The Yiddish word for “beautiful” sounds like shay-na (that is the feminine form). The first syllable rhymes with “say”. It was once natural, if you saw the spelling “shana”, to pronounce it “shay-na” and so people gave their daughters the name “Shana”. Younger, educated people now expect that a word that looks foreign should be pronounced (more or less) with European vowels (essentially those of Spanish), so that they would say “shah-na”. The first syllable rhymes with “pa”. So some people started naming their daughters “Shaina” to avoid this, and others named their daughters “Shana” and pronounced it “shah-na”.

In many European languages (not French) “Shaina” would be pronounce “shy-na”. So how do you spell the name so that it is pronounced “shay-na” by every native English speaker? Probably Shayna is the best choice, and there are people named Shayna. There are also people named Shawna because their parents heard the name “Shana” pronounced that way and thought it was spelled “Shawna”. (You can check these claims on Google.)

Once upon a time almost every American would say “shay-na” when seeing the spelling “Shana”. For Bernstein they would say “burn-steen” not “bairn-shtine” (the conductor said “burn-steen”). Churchill said “nazzi” for Nazi instead of “nah-tsee”. People rhymed “Lagrange” with “range” and accented “Berlin” and “Madrid” on the first syllable.

People without college education still do these things. But the educated classes have come to believe that they must pronounced foreign words as if they were speaking that language. They are inconsistent about it, they still say “Paris” to rhyme with “Harris”, but they pronounce less common foreign words in the way they think they are pronounced in the original language.

This comes out of snobbery (I am educated and you are not) but also out of genuine enjoyment at saying things in foreign languages. It is not all snobbery.

But whatever the motive, it is causing a disaster. English has always had irregular spelling, but in fact people could make a stab at saying a word they say in print and often get it right. The situation is much worse now. We have gotten to the point where we simply have to know how lots of words are pronounced. The spelling gives no clue.

This is a catastrophe for English spelling.

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Younger people frequently devoice final d while keeping the length of the vowel, so for example “road” ends with a t sound. The word does not become homophonic with “rote” because the latter has a shorter vowel, shorter in the time it takes to pronounce it (“long” and “short” are often used to denote vowel quality but I am not talking about that here.)

I became especially aware of this when I started singing in choirs twenty years ago. A person standing next to me would sing “Lord” ending in a distinct “t” sound, often released. I noticed younger people doing it more than older people. I have mentioned this occasionally in choir practice, and some leaders really don’t want me to end “Lord” with a voiced d, at least not a released voiced d.

Linguists have noticed this, but the articles I have found mostly discuss it happening in African American speech. But I swear I have heard it many times from white native English speakers.

Last week for the umpteenth time I was in the hospital. I told the nurse I would like to walk around the halls. She asked me, “Would you like a rope?” I asked her to repeat herself and finally decided she was saying “robe”. She released the p, too. She sounded like a native English speaker from Minnesota. I couldn’t tell if she was lengthening the vowel. I suppose I could have tried to elicit a minimal pair by asking her something like, “What do you hang people with in this hospital?” but, no…

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I said in a recent posting, “Perhaps the most annoying bug in English is the fact that “two”, “to” and “too” are pronounced identically.” That may be the most annoying bug in spoken English but the lack of a gender neutral third person pronoun is annoying in both spoken and written English.

This bug may be on its way to being eliminated by using “they” for “he or she”. This has got me to thinking about the future of the language. The plural “you” has already replaced the singular “thou/thee” in English. Perhaps someday “they” will oust “he” and “she” completely and become the only third person pronoun, or perhaps more likely the animate third person pronoun, contrasting with “it”.

English has a compulsory plural for nouns, like other European languages (except Turkish) and unlike most East Asian languages. But if the second and third person pronouns stop marking the plural, will nouns be far behind? A few dialects already eliminate it — notably in the West Indies. This development will only be encouraged as English becomes more and more everyone’s second language. I hope someone reads this in 2107 and puts me down in history as a linguistic Notradamus.

There is lots of interesting stuff about singular “they” on the web: See the comments on World Wide Words and by Geoff Pullum . (Was the previous sentence a zeugma?)

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Back in Ancient Times (even before Elvis) computer people had to deal with the problem that printers did not distinguish between the digit zero and the letter “O”. So they designed printers that printed “Ø” (a circle with a slash through it) for zero. For many years after that students in technical fields wrote their zeros “Ø”. This became a mark of their subculture – they were conscious of doing it as a statement of their geekhood. (See note 1).

Some countries have tried to reform their languages. In 1951 the Norwegian powers that be tried to get people to say the equivalent of “forty two” instead of “two and forty”. This was desirable because it causes confusion when telephone numbers are pronounced. For example, “2317 3251” would be said as if it were “three and twenty seventeen two and thirty one and fifty”. As this article shows, fifty years later a sizeable minority of Norwegians were still saying it that way.

Both France and Germany tried some modest spelling reforms in the 1990’s. Both met with stiff opposition and have had only spotty success.

Perhaps the most annoying bug in English is the fact that “two”, “to” and “too” are pronounced identically. (See note 2) This could be repaired easily by having everyone use the Scottish form “twa” (the confusion in practice comes mostly between “two” and one of the others). But if a joint Anglo-American commission tried to introduce this all hell would break loose. A minority would probably start using it, but I predict many local American school systems would try to ban it.

Technical people have a different feeling about changing their language. Some technical fields have organizations that occasionally promulgate changes in terminology. This can be good. What is really really bad is the practice of some mathematicians to redefine commonly used terms at the beginning of a book rather than introducing new terms. This makes it difficult to dip into the middle of a book (what Steenrod called being a “grasshopper”) or to have conversations with people in different fields. I ran into this when I was a brand new professor in a department with topologists who talked about “free groups”, by which they meant free Abelian groups. That raised this abuse to my consciousness and I have noticed many examples since then. One of the most egregious was that Bourbaki tried to redefine “positive” to mean “nonnegative”. A few people still follow that usage, including, I am told, some French public schools.

Note 1 Someone please give me a good internet reference to marks of subculture – the wikipedia site is too narrow. See my comments on grits in the covert curriculum.

Note 2 Actually, “to” may be pronounced with a schwa when it is unemphasized. But it is emphasized when you read a highway sign that says “to 95”, which sounds like “295”.

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This report from Science Daily describes the discovery of a correlation between the size of “Heschl’s Gyrus” in the brain and the ability to learn foreign languages. It also mentions an intriguing study that found that musical training started at an early age contributed to more successful spoken foreign language learning.

I have been pushing the idea that learning abstract math requires (among other things) learning a foreign language. So, I wonder, does the size of Heschl’s Gyrus correlated with ability at higher math? Also, the study about musical training suggests a reason for the commonly noted tendency for mathematicians to be musical, but I suppose that idea is pretty longshottish.

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