Herb,
Thanks for your interesting (as always) analysis. As a young linguist
"raised" on the voiced/voiceless distinction, I've been struggling lately
with the fortis/lenis distinction. Can you suggest an introductory source
that I can use to brush up on this? Also, do you even consider voicing when
describing a sound in isolation or do you just consider it a feature of
spoken language that occurs due to influence from neighboring sounds? For
example, if you were describing a phoneme in the abstract, would you
classify it by place of articulation, manner of articulation, and
fortis/lenis (is this strength? or sonority?).
Thanks for any info you can provide!
John Alexander
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 7:11 PM, STAHLKE, HERBERT F <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
> Several thoughts on nooze/noose.
>
> 1. I've noticed this pronunciation in a colleague of mine from
> Connecticut. In her case it's particularly evident with the -ese suffix
> designating languages, like Chinese and Japanese. It's more widespread than
> that but still unusual enough to be noticed.
>
> 2. There is a widely believed and perpetuated view of English consonant
> phonetics that is simply wrong. This is the notion that the English
> obstruents /ptkCfTsS/ are voiceless and /bdgjvDzZ/ are voiceless, and this
> is the fundamental difference between the two sets. In fact, it has been
> demonstrated both phonetically and phonologically, in numerous studies, that
> the former are fortis, having a strong articulation, and the latter lenis,
> having a weaker articulation. The lenis obstruents will voice when between
> voiced sounds, like vowels, nasals, and liquids, but elsewhere they are
> voiceless.
>
> 3. The difference between "sieze" and "cease" is twofold: "sieze" has a
> longer vowel, and the final consonants are lenis and fortis respectively.
>
> What's happening in the nooze/noose case may not be that the consonant is
> devoicing, since it's already voiceless in both cases but rather that the
> vowel has shortened before a lenis /z/ so that that important clue to a
> final lenis is lost and we perceive the final lenis as a fortis /s/. It may
> even become an /s/, although in my colleague's speech I don't think it does.
>
> There is also a morphological phenomenon involved that Bill astutely points
> out his analysis, suggesting, as he does, that the etymologically suffixal
> -s of "news" ceases to be a suffix and is reanalyzed as part of the root.
> However, I have a paper coming out in Word next year, written with a couple
> of grad students, arguing that the -s on "news," "dependence,"
> "linguistics," and "spokesman," arose in the late 16th c. or early 17th from
> several different sources that came together as a new suffix creating
> nominalized forms mostly from adjectives but also from other classes. That
> new suffix -s behaves phonologically just like all the other suffixes -s in
> English (at least four of them). This reanalysis of the final -s of "news"
> doesn't really bear on Bill's interesting suggestion that the word gets
> reanalyzed in some varieties of modern English, but the fact that other
> speakers do this with other suffixes as well suggests that there may be a
> sound change taking place in English neutralizing the consonant strength
> (fortis/lenis) contrast before or within some suffixes. This deserves
> further study.
>
> Herb
>
> Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
> Emeritus Professor of English
> Ball State University
> Muncie, IN 47306
> [log in to unmask]
> ________________________________________
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [
> [log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C [
> [log in to unmask]]
> Sent: November 18, 2008 12:54 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: nooze or noose?
>
> Dick,
>
> Is Montagne from Chicago? There are some dialects that regularly do that. –
> Bill Spruiell
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:
> [log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Veit, Richard
> Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 10:44 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: nooze or noose?
>
> Lately I'm noticing some people pronouncing the word news as "noose" rather
> than "nooze." For example, on Morning Edition, Steve Inskeep says "This is
> NPR nooze" but co-host Renee Montagne says "NPR noose."
>
> Generally Americans use the z sound for the plural marker following a vowel
> sound, as in days, fees, sighs, potatoes, and dues. So what's up with
> "noose"? Does it mean that news has become a monolithic morpheme ( {news}
> rather than {new} + {PLURAL} ) for them and so escapes the rule mandating
> the z-sound-after-vowels for the plural marker?
>
> Dick Veit
> ________________________________
> Richard Veit
> Department of English
> University of North Carolina Wilmington
>
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