Of migrant men, shifting sounds
and stagnant waters
A farewell lecture by Carlos Gussenhoven
Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, 23 September 2011
Mijnheer de Rector Magnificus, dames en heren
For over two decades, the second year Phonology course description has included the sentence
Languages resemble each other in the way [their sounds] are structured, but vary in the complexity of their sound systems. For
instance, the smallest number of segments that has been found
in any language is 11, the largest 144,...
In this lecture, I would like to show, first, that counting sounds has led to
a major discovery in linguistics, and second, argue that counting sounds has
helped to redefine research questions in phonetics and phonology.
1
Variation in phonological complexity
The data in that sentence came from Ian Maddieson’s 1984 survey of the
phoneme inventories of 317 languages, a number that was later increased to
451, which represents 7% of the total number of languages spoken in the world
(UPSID-II). Currently, these data have been incorporated in the phonological
data base of World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS), which now includes
phonological data for more than 600 languages. For instance, French has a
more complex vowels system than Spanish, because it has 12 vowels against
Spanish five. Complexity is spread throughout the phonology. Correlations
between numbers of phonological elements, like vowels, consonants, tones,
are largely positive, never negative. Having more vowels means having more
tones, more tones means more consonants (Maddieson 2011). Languages
with more phonemes also tend to have more complex syllable structures. For
instance, Hawaiian, which has five vowels and eight consonants, only allows
a single consonant before the vowel in the syllable and does not allow any
consonant after it. As a result, all syllables have the form CV or just V. The
only complexity is created by the fact that vowels may be long, giving 10
syllable rhymes, and may combine with higher vowels into diphthongs, giving
1
another eight vowel types. The number of possible syllables therefore is 9
(eight consonants plus absence of a consonant) × (10 + 8), or 162. Following
Maddieson (1984), Ryan Shosted (2006) did this kind calculation for a sample
of 32 languages, to show the multiplicative effect of these structural options.
2
Migrant men: an important discovery
Until 2007, it was always a matter of some fascination that no one had ever
come up with any correlate of phonological complexity, other than the logical correlate of word length (Nettle 1998). But no external factors, like
political organization or technological development, correlate with phonological complexity. Whatever the factors are that determine the phonological
structure of languages, there are apparently many degrees of freedom. Languages with few phonemes are just as workable as those with many. While
these observations remain true, a first indication that there was more behind
phonological complexity came in 2007, when Jennifer Hay and Laurie Bauer
(2007) showed that there was a weak, but robust positive correlation between
population size and number of phonemes: smaller populations have smaller
phoneme sets. They offered a plausible explanation, the only problem being
that they would have had an equally plausible explanation if the situation
had been the reverse. The next step occurred on 15 April 2011 of this year,
when Quentin Atkinson published an article in Science based on 504 languages which showed that there was a fairly substantial correlation between
the number of phonemes, measured as the mean of the normalized frequencies of the vowels, the consonants and the tones (‘Phoneme Diversity’), and
the geographical distance from the southwest of Africa, as measured along
the continental transit points known to have been used by modern man
when colonizing the planet. The correlation explains 30% of the variance in
phonological complexity against 14% by Hay and Bauer’s population size.
Moreover, the variation due to population size is largely subsumed by that
explained by distance from Africa. Spectacularly, the pattern of decreasing
complexity would appear to reflect man’s first colonization of the planet,
some 50 to 70 millenia ago (Fig. 1). Starting from south west Africa, we
moved into the Eurasian landmass via the Middle East, moved along the
southern edge of Asia and crossed over to Australia, some 40,000 years ago.
About 14,000 years ago we trekked along the Bering Strait into North America, making our way south over the next 6,000 years or so; lastly, about 3,000
years ago, we moved into Oceania, with New Zealand being among the most
recently colonized areas, some 1200 years ago. In addition to leaving a trail
of diminishing phoneme sets, modern man also left a trail of ever smaller
2
populations.
Exactly one month ago, Ian Maddieson discussed these findings at the Seventeenth International Conference of Phonetic Sciences in Hong Kong. Treading carefully, he suggested that it might be too early to draw conclusions
from the Atkinson findings, since an observation made in 1996 about a climatic correlate of sound systems had not been taken into account: briefly,
cold climates favour complex syllables. Complex syllables have many consonants, like English strictst (cf. a simple syllable like go). Munroe, Fought,
& Macauley (2009) showed that it is the sonority of sounds that drives this
correlation, since non-sonorant [i] and the sonorant consonants do not fall in
with the broader generalisation. Incidentally, Munroe et al. (2009) explain
the correlation by assuming that, other than in warmer climates, language
use in colder climates largely takes place indoors. Possibly, it is rather the
level of ambient noise that is the main explanatory variable, rain forests being
particularly noisy places. A rhetorical example is Tamazight, the group of
Berber language spoken in the Sahara. In some varieties, like Tarifit Berber,
utterances can consist only of voiceless obstruents. A close example is (1),
where [@] can be a voiceless release and [n] may thus be the only voiced sound
(with thanks to Abder el Aissati).
(1)
[tQ @tQ .f@tQ .t@nt]
/t
tt
ttQ f d
ten t/
2SG IMPERF catch 2SG 3PL Fem
‘You catch them’
To see if this ecological factor has played a role the results presented by
Atkinson, I first established that it can in fact be detected in his data. I defined it as the distance from the equator expressed as Absolute Latitude (see
Fig. 2). Atkinson only used aggregate vowel, consonant and tone fequencies,
which don’t allow a breakdown into more and less sonorant sounds. Still,
there are negative correlations between Absolute Latitude and both vowel
frequency (r=-0.19) and tone frequency (r=-0.26), and a positive correlation
with consonant frequency (r=0.27), all p<.01), meaning that closer to the
equator there are more tones and vowels and fewer consonants than in places
further away, confirming the finding by Munroe and colleagues. I also constructed a crude sonority index by dividing the mean normalized frequencies
of vowels and tones by the normalized consonant frequency, after adding 2
to all values to avoid negative numbers. As predicted, there is a negative
correlation with Absolute Latitude (r=-0.30, p<.01). There is no correlation
with Distance from Origin.
3
Figure 1: Boxplot of phoneme diversity by global region showing highest diversity
in Africa and lowest in Oceania and South America (top) and map of the world
showing highest phoneme diversity in Africa with diminishing diversity in areas
that were settled later, controlled for population size (bottom). From Atkinson
(2011).
4
Figure 2: Map of the world indicating equator, Absolute Latitude and correlations
between Absolute Latitude and normalized vowel, tone and consonant densities
and a crude sonority index (see text). Adapted from Atkinson’s map with transit
points.)
I then ran a stepwise linear regression with Phoneme Diversity as the dependent variable and Distance from Origin, Log Population and Absolute
Latitude as predictor variables. While unsurprisingly the results for the first
two variables were as presented by Atkinson, no predictive contribution by
Absolute Latitude was found.1 We can conclude then that Ian Maddieson
trod too softly, and that Atkinson’s data do indeed suggest that language,
as we know it today, existed when modern man left Africa and that all languages of the world can trace their origin to that source.
Atkinson explains this finding as a linguistic version of the Serial Founder
Effect, the loss of genetic variation that occurs when a new population is established by a small number of people moving away from a larger population.
Among other things, it explains the vulnerability of the American populations to European diseases during the Columbian Exchange, which started in
1491 (Mann 2005), and the relative immunity of the European population to
American diseases. While the Americans suffered near-extinctions as a result
of European diseases, the only American disease to pose a problem to the
1
There is in fact no correlation between Absolute Latitude and Distance from Origin.
There is a weak correlation between Absolute Latitude and Phoneme Diversity (r=-.09,
p<.05). I assume this is because Atkinson’s Phoneme Diversity measure contains two
‘sonorous’ componenents, vowels and tones, and only one ‘non-sonorous’ component, which
biases the measure to sonority and thus closeness to the equator. If we take the mean of
tones and consonants or the mean of vowels and consonants, the correlation disappears.
5
Europeans was syphilis. But language is not genetic. Even if our strategies
for learning and structuring languages are genetic, their content is not. (It
would require another lecture to work this one out, so I refer to a recent article on linguistc diversity by Nick Evans and Stephen Levinson (2009).) So
how do small groups of migrants get to lose so many phonemes? Atkinson’s
answer is that languages gain segments in older settlement locations because
of the presence of other languages in the same location.
If a group of Dutch speakers had left the Dutch Republic in 1700, say, they
might have ended up with a system of long vowels much like (2a). But in
the old country in 1950, that vowel system was more like (2b) (Moulton
1962). The high vowels have split into a short set (riem, excuus, kroes ‘belt,
excuse, mug’) and a long set (team, étude, cruise), four nasal vowels were
introduced, as in (enfin, parfum, bon ton), and there are three new low vowels (serre, oeuvre, zone ‘conservatory, works, zone’), increasing the 7-vowel
system to a 17-vowel one. Around 2000, we effectively lost the four nasal
vowels, but gained long [A:], as in cast, Master and Dove (cf. kast, tweemaster, DAF), see (2c). That is, staying put will increase your phonemes, as
shown anecdotally in (2).
(2) a. ca. 1700 CE
i:
y:
u:
e:
ø:
o:
a:
b. ca. 1950 CE
i/i: y/y:
u/u:
e:
ø:
o:
E: œ:
O:
a:
Ẽ: õe:
Õ:
Ã:
c. ca. 2000 CE
i/i: y/y:
u/u:
e:
ø:
o:
E: œ:
O:
a:
A:
Phoneme accretion must not be confused with language change in the usual
sense. The ‘Out of Africa’ connection is with phoneme inventory size, an
aspect of language that has long been known to be far more constant than
the distribution of phonemes over the words of the language. The English
Great Vowel Shift may serve as an example of language change in the usual
sense. In (3a), the system of long vowels is given as it might have been used
by Geoffrey Chaucer, while in (3b) we see the system as might have been used
by William Shakespeare. Due to the lengthening of short vowels in a number
of contexts, such as in position before [r] (not all already in Shakespeare’s
time), new low long vowels arose to fill the gaps left by Chaucer’s words
with low vowels. The Chaucerian high vowels of time and house had become
diphthongs, being pushed out of the system of monophtongs by the rising
[e:] and [o:] of meet and boot. Words with [a:] and [E:] moved up two steps,
6
except for a small group of high frequency [E:] words like great, which got
stuck at [e:]. If the two poets were to have run into each other in the afterlife,
each of them must have thought that the other had a peculiar pronunciation,
but they might also have figured out that their long vowel systems were pretty
much the same.
(3) a. ca. 1400 CE
i: time
u: house
e: meet
o: boot
E: great, neat O: goat
a: dame
3
b. ca. 1650 CE
i: meet, neat
u: boot
e: great, dame
o: goat
E: there
O: port
a: part
Redefining the research questions
Counting sounds has not just led to one of the most significant findings in
linguistics, it has also redefined research questions in phonetics and phonology. Knowing what’s rare and what’s common forces us to consider what the
factors are that shape sound systems. Phonological grammars are evolving
systems, like biological species and technologies. In all these cases, we would
like to know what the factors are that drive the changes, and what effects
states of the system have. These are not the questions that have been at
the heart of linguistic theory. For better or worse, linguistics adopted the
model of the physical sciences. Physicists make observations about matter,
gravity, light and time, and develop theories with physical elements and principles that explain their observations, regardless of whether those elements
are observable. Likewise, linguists have considered that they could observe
language data, but not look inside the black box in our brains that creates
them. Linguistic elements thus became like Higg’s particles: instead of asking why it exists and how it came into being, the question was whether a
concept is needed to account for the data. Quite accidentally, this scientific
stance in linguistics meshed with the finding that phonological elements have
no consistent phonetic realization, and are in that sense unobservable. The
pronunciation of consonants, tones, syllables, phonological phrases, etc. is
context-dependent, and since contexts are infinitely variable, so are the pronunciations of the phonological elements, much to the chagrin of our speech
technological friends. While we understand the insults hurled to us by the
inarticulate drunk, no automatic speech recognizer will achieve the same feat
for many years to come. At the semantic end of language, we have tended
to ask what the function or functions of linguistic elements are. However,
phrased in that way, such questions can be hard to answer satisfactorily, as in
7
the case of wisdom teeth, nominal gender, or as I’ll show below, the British
dual flow mixer tap.
The factors I’m going to discuss will have an effect the distribution of phonological elements across the population of languages. Less well understood is
whether the frequency of sounds within languages is determined by the same
factors. If two languages have the same set of voiceless obstruents, but are
spoken at different distances from the equator, will the speakers who live
closer to the equator use them less frequently? The answer is probably ‘no’,
because the ecological factor is historical. Noise levels in the temperate zones
may today in fact be higher than nearer the equator. But ergonomic factors
are unchanged. They favour sound contrasts that are easy to achieve and
easy to hear, as testified in Maddieson (1984). But unusual sounds are not
just unusual because they appear in relatively few languages, they also tend
to be less frequent in the languages that have them (Gussenhoven & Jacobs
1998: 32/2011: 40) . The frequencies of the voiceless and voiced plosives
in British English2 (panel a of Fig 3) show the same biases as the frequencies of the voiceless and voiced plosives in UPSID-II, using Henning Reetz’s
interface (Reetz no date) (panel b).3
2
The data were taken from Gimson (2006) and are originally from Fry (1947), who
must have collected them the year before, as I was being borne, given that academics in
those days tended to do their research in the summer.
3
Briefly, voiceless plosives are more frequent than voiced plosives, because the oral
closure for voiced plosives inhibits voicing due to rising supraglottal air pressure as vocal
fold vibration drives more air into the chamber between the vocal folds and the plosive’s
closure. This problem is most acute for [g], where the supraglottal air chamber is smallest
(Ohala 1983). In the voiceless series, [p] is rarer than expected, because of the poor
acoustics of the plosive burst, which occurs outside the resonance chamber of the vocal
tract (Stevens 1997). The fourth bias, for coronal consonant, is also present in both data
sets; I am uncertain of the explanation of the privileged position of the coronal place of
articulation.
8
Figure 3: The frequency of voiceless and voiced plosives in UPSID-II (bottom)
and their text frequency in English (top).
9
4
Shifting sounds: The factors that shape
sound systems
The factors that shape sound systems are summarized in (4).
(4)
a. The ecological factor
b. The social factor
(i) Parents: historical linguistics
(ii) Subgroup: sociolinguistics
(iii) Geography: dialectology
c. The ergonomic factor
(i) Hearer serving: precision, enhancement
(ii) Speaker serving: assimilation, reduction, lenition, truncation,
undershoot, ...
(iii) Frequency of use
d. The cognitive factor
4.1
The social factor
The effect of the ecological factor we have just seen. If there was no social
factor, no two humans would speak the same language. It captures the role of
the generations passing on their language to new generations, including the
‘Out of Africa’ connection, as well as the socially motivated adjustments we
all make in the course of our lives. This latter effect was illustrated with the
dramatic changes in the pronunciation of the British English short vowels
made by Queen Elizabeth II between her twenties and fifties (Harrington,
Palethorpe, & Watson 2000). A third social dimension is determined by who
we live next to. I would like to illustrate this factor on the basis of the
frequency of use of intonation contours from our recently completed NWO
programme Intonation in Varieties of Dutch. As far as prosody is concerned,
the Netherlands falls into two quite distinct zones. The first begins just
north of Venlo and extends south from there so as to cover the southern
half of the province of Limburg. The second zone is the rest of the country.
We investigated the intonation of speakers from five locations in zone II
that lie in an arc along the coast, plus a sixth, just inside Germany, which
was added by Jörg Peters, the postdoc in this project, now Professor of
Linguistics in the University of Oldenburg (Fig. 4). He counted intonation
contours in the readings of a story by some 15 to 20 speakers per dialect.
10
My concern here is the geographical distribution of three question contours,
whose frequencies I summed over the syntactic categories ‘Yes-no Question’,
‘List’ and ‘Statements’. A question like Bedoel je de Radboud Universiteit
Nijmegen? can be pronounced in at least three ways. In (5), we see the High
Rise, the Low Rise and the Fall-Rise.4
(5)
•
•
◦
•
◦
{Bedoel je de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen}
|
%L
H* H%
(6)
•
•
•
◦ •
{Bedoel je de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen}
|
%L
L*H H%
(7)
•
•
◦
•
{Bedoel je de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen}
|
%L
H*L H%
•
As shown in Fig. 5, the frequency of the High Rise decreases going from
Goes to Weener (south-west to north-east), that of the Low Rise broadly
increases, while the Fall-Rise shows an increase in the central area. As shown
by former student Esther Grabe (2002, 2004), varieties of a language may
have the same grammar, but differ in the way they use the structures they
have in common. What hadn’t yet been shown for any language group is
the fine-grained areal distribution, and I apologize to Jörg Peters for stealing
his thunder. It is tempting to go beyond what we see. For one thing, we
may predict that Belgian Dutch uses the High Rise, and that the Low Rise
4
Former student Judith Haan (2002) found four interrogative contours to be reasonably
frequent in standard Dutch, the three identified in (5) plus L* H%, the Low Low Rise,
where the pitch remains low after the accented syllable until the last syllable. This contour
may be hard to distinguish from the Low Rise when the accented syllable is close to the
end of the intonational phrase. The frequency of occurrence in our data is negligibly low.
11
Figure 4: The tonal (Zone I) and non-tonal (Zone II) areas of the Netherlands
and six locations along the North Sea Coast.
is either non-existent or rarely used. This would concur with the finding
by former student Brechtje Post (2000) that French does not have a L* in
its grammar, suggesting the existence of an intonational continuum across
a language boundary. What about the hump in the Fall-Rise in Holland
and Friesland? Might it be an innovation that spread from England? John
Wells characterizes the use of the Fall-Rise in questions as common in ‘local or
Near-RP’, giving the Low Rise for RP (Wells 1981: 373), and notes elsewhere
(Wells 2006: 245, note 8) that Roger Kingdon explicitly says that the FallRise is not used for questions (1958: 10).5 A tentative conclusion might be
that the central hump in our data reflects a British innovation, which has
made its way into Dutch as it made its way into RP. If so, it is a sobering
thought that since American English uses the High Rise and Low Rise for
questions, Jane Austen would no doubt have preferred an American cast for
the film versioon of her Pride and Prejudice.
4.2
The ergonomic factor
The ergonomic factor amounts to the etablishment of a balance between
the interests of the hearer and the interests of the speaker in the way the
speaker pronounces his words. Not overprecisely, but not too sloppily either.
Making contrasts clear for the hearer, Lindblom’s (1990) ‘hyperarticulation’,
5
I thank John Wells for pointing me to these comments.
12
Figure 5: The High Rise decreasing in frequency and the Low Rise increasing
in frequency as one goes from Goes to Weener. The use of the Fall-Rise is frequent in Rotterdam and Grouw, less frequent elsewhere. From Peters, Hanssen &
Gussenhoven (in preparation).
often amounts to the recruitment of additional phonetic features, known as
‘enhancement’. Taking liberties with precision in articulation, Lindblom’s
‘hypoarticulation’, has been much more widely studied and comes in many
flavours, like ‘assimilation’, ‘undershoot’, ‘truncation’, ‘reduction’, ‘lenition’,
‘deletion’, and so on.6
Let’s take the Great Vowel Shift again, and ask ourselves what caused it.
William Labov (1994) observed that quite generally, long vowels tend to
raise and short vowels to lower, and that this behaviour can be explained as
serving to enhance the difference between long and short vowels.
6
High frequency of use of words or expressions shifts the balance in the battle between
speaker and hearer in the direction of the speaker. Frequent words allow more reduction
(Ernestus & Warner 2011) and will need less enhancement. Frequency of use is primarily
determined by communicative factors. Words are frequent because they express meanings
and functions that are often encountered by language users, like sentence coordinators,
pronouns or basic meanings. As result, the English noun can is pronounced [kæn], but
the auxiliary is [k@n] if it occurs in its typical location befor the main verb (Gimson 2006),
while a frequent word like time will be more reduced than a rare word like thyme (Gahl
2008).
13
Figure 6: A high vowel [i] with a quickly reachable target position for tongue and
jaw and a mid vowel [e] with a target position that takes longer to reach starting
from a position with the tongue on the palate.
This answer correctly places the problem in category 3a of (4), the hearerserving ergonomic factor. It doesn’t, however, answer the question why it is
the long vowels that raise rather than the short, or why they don’t nasalize
or aren’t spoken with breathy voice. I proposed an answer to this question
in Gussenhoven (2006), and fortunately for us, it has yet to be generally
accepted, so that it retains an air of freshness. Higher vowels sound longer.
In two perception experiments with Dutch listeners, I found that [i] sounds
longer than [e] and [e] longer than [E], if they have the same acoustic duration. Listeners compensated for an inherent articulatory circumstance: lower
vowels take longer to produce, assuming a rest position with the tongue on
the palate. The distance that the tongue and jaw need to travel to the vowel
target position is longer the further away the target is from the palate. Listeners may choose to discount the travelling time towards and away from the
target when judging the duration of the vowel. This is shown impressionistically in Fig. 6. On the left, a high [i] is depicted, with excursion from the
palate tracked below it. On the right is a lower vowel like [e]: its effective
duration is shorter, as shown by the interrupted lines.7
7
Roger Lass (1976: 66) called the question why the Great Vowel Shift took the shape
it did the ‘inception problem’. It is rare in the recent linguistics literature to see the
question why sounds change the way they do discussed at all. His comments, however,
reveal the usual reserve when he says that he had no idea where to look for an answer,
and dismissed an answer that was given earlier as incomprehensible. Lass did answer an
14
4.3
The changing Franconian tone
My explanation of the Great Vowel Shift is a spin off from my work on
Limburgish dialects, where similar vowel shifts have occurred as a result of
the enhancement of a duration difference. These dialects have a lexical tone
contrast, whereby one tone, the ‘sleeptoon’ or ‘Accent 2’, is typically longer
than the ‘stoottoon’ or ‘Accent 1’, in addition to differing in pitch. Here, I
am concerned with the pitch differences. In addition to having a lexical tone
contrast, the dialects contrast intonation contours. One curious fact is that
in the question intonation a low rise on the last syllable of an intonational
phrase signifies Accent 2 in Roermond, but Accent 1 in Venlo (see Fig. 7).
The declaratives are very similar, a fall for Accent 1 and a fall-rise or falllevel for Accent 2, but where Roermond has a rise-fall vs a low rise for the
interrogatives, Venlo has a low rise vs a high rise. Internally in the sentence,
the tone is high level, and the rise only comes at the end of the intonation
phrase. This is shown in Fig. 8.
Venlo looks like a late addition to the tonal area. While core dialects like
Roermond have strikingly different intonation contours from German and
Dutch, all of Venlo’s intonation contours also exist in the standard language.
However, they sometimes signify lexical differences instead of intonation differences. So it is with the Dutch High Rise and Low Rise. The grammar
could have worked with the reverse assignment of the lexical tones, but Venlo
speakers assigned the High Rise to Accent 2, and the Low Rise to Accent 1.
As it happens, High level tones sound longer that low rising tones, and the
High Rise is therefore ergonomically the better choice, as it will favour the
recognition of the tone. In Fig. 9 we see the perceived durations of the vowel
[a] embedded in a nonsense expression [meka/mega] by group of 20 Chinese
and 20 Dutch listeners. Strikingly, the high level pitch is heard as longest,
and the low level pitch as shortest. (This is based on work in progress with
Wencui Zhou. For an explanation of these effects, see Yu (20o6)). Now you
important preliminary question though, the ‘Order problem’. Was it was the high vowels
that first diphthongized, after which the mid vowels raised to fill the gaps they left behind
(Jespersen 1909: 231) or was it the mid vowels that raised so as to push out the high
vowels, which then diphthongized (Luick 1964: 559)? The Luick version, the ‘push chain’
theory, is entailed by my explanation. Significantly, Lass presented data from dialects that
unambiguously answered the order problem in favour of Luick’s descripion. If there was
no mid vowel that could raise to push out the high vowel, Luick’s account predicts that
the high vowel would not diphthongize. This is in fact what happened in Northern and
Scottish dialects, where boot [bo:t] had fronted to [bøøt], later [by:t] or [bi:t]. In all the
present-day versions of those dialects house is still [huus].
15
Figure 7: The Low Rise signifying interrogative Accent 1 in Venlo and interrogative Accent 2 in Roermond in phrase-final position, illustrated on the segmental
structure [Gra:f]
Figure 8: The interrogative Accent 1 (a low rise, example a) and Accent 2 (a high
level, example a), contrasting in phrase-internal position. From Gussenhoven &
van der Vliet (1999).
16
Figure 9: Perceived duration of [a] in nonsense utterances [mega/meka] as a
function of pitch contour on [a] by 20 Chinese and 20 Dutch listeners. With
Wencui Zhou, in preparation.
may ask: if the low level tone is the shortest perceptually, then why didn’t
they pick it for Accent 1?
Here, I can make reference to the final factor that shapes sound systems,
the cognitive factor. It concerns the kind of generalizations that humans
make over data, given the cognitive organization of linguistic structure. Languages assign tones to elements in the phonological structure, known as Tone
Bearing Units. In the Venlo dialect, these are the moras of the accented syllable. This is a sensible generalization, inspired by the fact that in Roermond,
the donor dialect, the lexical tone contrast is absent on syllables that have
only one sonorant mora: the presence of Accent 2 is tied to the presence of
a second mora. A long vowel has two moras, and there shall therefore be
two tones attached to any such syllable. For Accent 2 questions, the first
has intonational H* and the second has the lexical H. Words with Accent
1 have no lexical tone. For Accent 1 questions, which have L* on the first
mora, the tone that attaches to the second mora of syllable is whichever tone
is found in the tone string further along, which is always a H-tone. There
will therefore always be a rise in a long syllable starting with L*. Equally
predictably, when the syllable has a short vowel, the low tone is there, since
there is no second mora for a H to attach to.
So what about the rise for Accent 2 in the Roermond question? In Gussenhoven (2000), I hypothesized that this form was handed down from the days
before the tone contrast was introduced. The action in Roermond and the
17
Figure 10: Development of phrase-final contour for monosyllabic declarative Accent 2 from Cologne, via intermediate stages represented by Mayen and Roermond to Arzbach through truncation, plus enhancement of the Arzbach contrast
by hearer-oriented undershooting of the Accent 1 contour. In addition, it shows
the development from Roermond to Venlo through undershoot of the final mid
rise. The Arzbach contrast is the broadly the reverse of that found in Cologne.
remaining area is in the form for the IP-final declarative Accent 2. It started
out as a lengthened version of the original falling intonation, a high followed
by a late fall, a form that still exists today in the dialect of Cologne, H*H L%,
which contrasted with H* L% for Accent 1 (Gussenhoven & Peters 2004). (I
am using italic print to indicate the lexical tone.) The main development was
a truncation drive after a dip had developed between the two H-tones. An
early stage can still be detected in the dialect of Mayen in the Eifel, thanks
to the work by Jürgen Erich Schmidt (1986), whose data show a weak final
fall in the fading portion of the speech files. In the Roermond dialect, we
see the stage with a final rise, without a hint of a further fall, analysed as
H* L% H, still always contrasting with H* L% for Accent 1. As we have
seen, Venlo developed from this system, adopting a form of this contour with
undershoot of the final rise, analzed as H*L L% by Gussenhoven & van der
Vliet 1999). It is not hard to see where the truncation process would lead to
if it continued to eat away at the end of this contour. There would be a steep
early fall, contrasting with a slower fall. The lexical tone would be analysed
as an extra L, giving H*L L%, always versus H* L% for Accent 1.
In 1912, the German dialectologist Adolf Bach visited Arzbach, on the other
side of the tonal area, east of the Rhine, acting on the rumour that Catholic
villages in the area did, but Protestant villages did not have the tone contrast
18
(Bach 1921). I don’t know if this religious question has ever been answered,
but what Bach did find was that in Arzbach Accent 1 and Accent 2 had
reversed! He published his finding in 1921 after checking his facts again in
the previous year. His publication gave rise to the division into a Regel A
area, in which Mayen is located, and a Regel B area, with Arzbach as its best
representative. It was Björn Köhnlein (2011), who earlier this year defended
a PhD thesis in Leiden, who showed that the reversal had in fact only taken
place in the declaratives, quite as predicted by the hyper-truncation theory.8
5
Stagnant waters: The dual-flow mixer tap
Let us now apply our changing systems view to a technological development
in British sanitory equipment. It provides an illustration of how defining
the function of things is less fruitful than trying to understand how things
developed. Take the British dual flow mixer tap. A tap of that kind keeps
the hot water separate from the cold until the end of the spout. Two reasons
have been given for this particular arrangement. One is evidently secondary:
when running the hot water, we can safely touch the tap, as the hot pipe
is fully encapsulated by the cold. This is true, however, only for the concentric type, one of the five types I will distinguish below. Moreover, it is
somewhat of a chutzpah to advance this feature as a boon in the light of
the many foreigners who have scalded their hands under a British hot tap.
More commonly, the explanation refers to the risk of backflow. Backflow
may conceivably occur when the water pressure disappears due to a breach
in the mains and soiled water from some high positioned cistern or washing
machine runs back into the mains. My physical friends tell me that for this
to happen in a single-flow mixer tap, one of the two supply mains must be
sub-atmospheric, since the water will flow to the point of lowest pressure,
modulo gravity. Moreover, this would happen at the spout end as easily as
inside the tap. And then the chances that sub-atmospheric pressure at one
inlet should coincide with a polluted supply at the other, are very low indeed,
to the extent that it seems safe to assume that it has never come to pass in
the history of the British water industry.
The real reason for the mixer tap is that the British have a mental model
of washing involving a filled basin, as opposed to the continental model of
a flowing jet. When confronted with the continental mixer tap, the first
British manufacturer must have failed to see its purpose, that of mixing hot
8
Björn Köhnlein addresses the historical development, but his account differs from
mine.
19
Figure 11: Diagrams of dual and single flow mixer taps with the prevention of
backflow as an explanation of the purpose of the dual flow type (bottom right).
Information leaflet by Abode, British a manufacturer of kitchen taps.
20
Figure 12: Hypothesized chronology of the British dual flow mixer tap.
and cold to a comfortable temperature for the hands. The best theory the
manufacturer must have been able to come up with was that this was a clever
way of saving metal. The British model therefore is originally not so much
a mixer tap as a mixed tap. Faced with having to interpret the function of
this double tap, the next generation came up with the backflow prevention
solution (Fig. 11). This theory suggests a chronology of the British mixer
tap in which the first model looks close to what you would get if you squeeze
two taps together, a tap with a neat vertical partition down the centre, the
Ur model (see Fig. 12). From it, various fancy models arose, like one with
a horizontal partition in a square spout, the oldest specimen I have been
able to find in a junk yard in East London. Later there came the concentric
model, which I know from the kitchens in the flats of Sir Christopher France
House on the Queen Mary campus in East London. Once the two pipes were
properly separated, as in the twin model, the road to the triple-flow mixer tap
was open. I have labeled it OTT, or Over The Top. In the triple flow mixer
tap, to use the more plangeant phrase, the third pipe is used for filtered water.
In tune with the filled basin model, plumbing regulations emphasize that
“every bath, wash basin, sink or similar appliance shall be provided with a
watertight and readily accessible plug or or other device capable of closing
the waste outlet.” This blanket instruction is mercifully followed by a series
of exceptions, among which are showers, drinking fountains and washbasins
with self-closing taps, as well as any “appliance which is used in medical,
21
dental or veterinary premises and is designed or adapted for use with an
unplugged outlet”.9
But doubts have crept in even in official circles. The rationality of the instruction to install check valves in the hot and cold pipes leading into contintental
style mixer tap are not or no longer formulated with confidence. Regulation
R15.13.2 of the Water Regulations Advisory Scheme in Gwent10 says that
“it may be considered reasonable” to do so, adding somewhat lamely that
the Water Supply Industry “supports the provision of single check valves
[...] where there are unbalanced pressures”, while adding that the industry “deems that the particular requirement of the Regulation will be met if
there are no check valves” in the case of balanced pressures. The apparent
concern about water pressure reveals how the first interpretation of the dual
flow mixer tap was that of a device to prevent backflow. The vacillation
in this recommendation continues in the final sentence, which says boldly
that “where a combination tap or mixer with water mixing in the body is
used with balanced pressures (that is, both inlets are fed from supply pipes
or both are from storage), the “cold side’ is now rated as Fluid Category
1, and the hot side’ is now rated Fluid Category 2, and single check valves
should therefore - according to the Regulations - be installed on both ‘sides’”.
There are many more consequences of the British mental model for washing. Showers, which according to Catherine Ashenburg (2007) are vaguely
associated in the British mind with penitentiary institutions, are believed to
be out of order more often than on the continent, and shower manufacturers
find themselves having to target special interest groups like the elderly who
cannot get into a bath, but who may still be able to take a shower bath while
seated. Taps are typically mounted close to the wall of the washbasin, making it hard to use the water for washing your hands as it flows into the basin,
and the water pressure is often too low for a comfortable continental-style
shower. But then, the water pressure just needs to be high enough - you
have guessed it - for creating stagnant waters.
6
Words of thanks
My words of thanks are first of all addressed to the Dutch taxpayers, many
of whom are present here today. Thanks to them I studied English Language
9
Article 28 of the Statutory Instruments 1999 No. 1148 from the Water Supply (Water
Fittings) Regulations 1999.
10
I thank Gareth Harris of WRAS for this information.
22
and Literature in Amsterdam supported by a mix of grants and repayable
interest-free loans. Before going to Edinburgh for my year abroad, I arranged to see someone in the Ministry of Education in order to explain how
my Dutch grant money was insufficient to support my stay there, which
resulted in an additional award of a thousand guilders. Little did he or I
know that two months later, the then Prime Minister Harold Wilson was
to devalue the pound by 14%, famously commenting that this devaluation
“doesn’t mean of course that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or
purse or in your bank, has been devalued.” It did have the effect though of
multiplying the pounds in my pocket. When I began work in Nijmegen, the
small debt in student loans I had run up was restructured, meaning I never
paid it back. My thanks equally go to the College van Bestuur for appointing
me and to my colleagues in the administrative and other units in the Arts
Faculty in Nijmegen, from the Faculty board and the wider 4th floor of the
Erasmusgebouw, the English department and the Linguistics department to
the informal lunch group of the 9th floor. I am sincerely grateful for their
practical and moral support. And I thank my students for making me want
to understand things.
I will fight off the angst that comes with mentioning names by showing,
proudly and gratefully, the names of my co-authors (see (8), and then, while
you are contemplating the list, mentioning the names of five people who can
be emblematic for the help I have received at different phases of my career.
(8) Flor Aarts, Jan Aarts, Vahideh Abolhasani Zadeh, Rob van den Berg,
Frank van den Beuken, Jan Blom†, Sara Bögels, Dwight Bolinger†,
Theo Bongaerts, Rolf Bremmer, Ton Broeders, Gösta Bruce†, Aoju
Chen, Yiya Chen, Manni Chu, Dorothee Chwilla, Peter-Arno Coppen,
Mariapaola D’Imperio, Wilske Driessen, Lex Elich, Rachel Fournier,
Esther Grabe, Judith Haan, Peter Hagoort, Judith Hanssen, Xuliang
He, Linda Heijmans, Vincent van Heuven, Elise Hofhuis, Roeland van
Hout, Haike Jacobs, Ole Jensen, René Kager, Cornelia Keijsper, Eric
Kellerman, Joop Kerkhoff, Carmen Kung, Erwin Marsi, Ger Peerbooms, Frans van Oss, Jörg Peters, Brechtje Post, Bruno Repp, Tomas
Riad, Toni Rietveld, Willem Rump, Herbert Schriefers, Marc Swerts,
Renske Teeuw, Jacques Terken, Inyang Udofot, Marco van de Ven, Jo
Verhoeven, Edward Verhofstadt, Peter van der Vliet, Natasha Warner,
Jeroen van de Weijer, Anne Wichmann, Wencui Zhou,
I thank Hans Bots, former dean of the faculty, for making me a professor
twice, the second time being when I had exhausted myself after a year’s
23
worth of commuting between Nijmegen and London. From Ton Broeders
I learnt how to listen to sounds in our early days in the Instituut EngelsAmerikaans, and more generally how to think. This latter aspect would be
adequately described as ‘with loads of common sense’, were it not for the
fact that his analytical talents are so uncommon. Leo Wetzels made me look
beyond the self-imposed confines of the Anglistiek, which ultimately brought
me to call myself a phonologist as opposed to an anglicist. I thank Toni Rietveld, with whom I experienced so many anni mirabiles. Before the waiter
had brought us our first beers, we had decided on the research question and
planned the experiment, leaving us little else to do for the rest of the meeting than to discuss the state of the world and, very very occasionally, gossip
about our colleagues. And I thank Aditi Lahiri for generally looking after me,
and for always forgiving me when I missed motorway exits, trains, planes,
and sometimes whole occasions. And now I will greatly enjoy mentioning the
names of Karel, Otto and Siegfried, who each in their own way have helped
me to keep a sane perspective on life. And I thank the amazing Hyong-Sil
Cho Gussenhoven, from whom I learn something every day. And not even
ever the same thing twice, as far as I’m aware. But it would take yet another
lecture to work that one out. So I’ll summarize the situation by observing
that Sil is responsible for the fact that I can pronounce my closing words a
happy man.
Ik heb gezegd.
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