The One with the Thoughts of Frans

The following article appeared on Wikipedia for a very short time due to a recent xkcd comic. It’s a reference back to Language Log, which references xkcd sometimes, but the reverse seldom happens.

A malamanteau (plural malamanteaux) is a neologism for a portmanteau created by incorrectly combining a malapropism with a neologism. It is itself a portmanteau of malapropism and portmanteau. In a less strict definition, a portmanteau of a malapropism with another word can also be considered a malamanteau. The contained malapropism must be typically a very common one, probably most people are not aware of, in order to be able to regain the meaning of a malamanteau.

A malamanteau often is created when somebody tries to use a neologism (alternatively, an idiom) but mistakenly confuses a word with another one. However, unlike a malapropism or an eggcorn, the fumbled word is not completely replaced, but merely transfixed to the new one. A famous example is: “misunderestimate” which was popularized by the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush. Probably it was intended to be “underestimate” but mistakenly jumbled with “misunderstand.”

Examples

• Somebody describes his misunderstanding of what someone was saying by stating, “I misconscrewed it up.”
• Somenone explains his inability to talk while being upset by saying he was “flustrated.”
• A meaningful malamanteau is “ambiviolent,” as in: “Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill was ambiviolent. She didn’t know who to kill first.”

I was going to write more about it when I made this draft, but by now it’s two weeks later and I’ve lost interest. Booyah.

Nowadays, the most obvious way to blend all kinds of UTF-8 characters in nicely with all the other text on your page might be Webfonts, but I think there are definitely valid reasons not to utilize those to achieve consistent display of IPA characters on a page. This post will focus on a very simple method which ensures that IPA will look decent across a variety of operating systems and browsers. The issue is nothing but aesthetics; however, the importance should not be underestimated as the following screenshot will demonstrate.

You can try the results of this yourself, but what it will look like depends on the fonts you have installed.

What I used to achieve the cohesive look of the IPA characters is this simple line of CSS.

.IPA{ font-family: "DejaVu Sans", "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode" }

It’s an easy concept. Slap class="IPA" on some element—I used SPAN—and it will automatically display in one of these fonts, ensuring that no characters look out of place. DejaVu Sans is a font I like a lot; It comes pre-installed on most Linux installations, and is freely available for everybody else. Lucida Grande is a font with the sufficient characters that comes with Mac OS X, and Lucida Sans Unicode is a font that, as the name implies, is very similar to Lucida Grande. It is available in Windows 98 and up.

References

“DejaVu Sans.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 12 Dec 2009 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DejaVu_fonts&oldid=329693253>.
“Lucida Grande.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 12 Dec 2009 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lucida_Grande&oldid=314108882>.
“Lucida Sans Unicode.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 12 Dec 2009 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lucida_Sans_Unicode&oldid=324714228>.

There are three sounds usually represented in writing as g or ch that I can produce.

1. Voiced velar fricative /ɣ/, as in Dutch gaan, transcribed as [ɣaːn].
2. Voiceless velar fricative /x/, as in German Kuchen, transcribed as [kuːxən].
3. Voiceless palatal fricative /ç/, as in German ich, transcribed as [ɪç].

From this list, you might guess that there is also a voiced palatal fricative, and you’d be right. I cannot, however, produce the /ʝ/, which can be seen as the Flemish equivalent to my Dutch /ɣ/.

According to commonly accepted Dutch phonetics, the second g-sound occurs in words like acht, thus transcribed as [ɑxt], and also in words like chaos, thus transcribed as [xaɔs].

For me, this is not the case. I pronounce all of my words with the voiced velar fricative. It’s definitely true that not all people do this: in the east of the Netherlands, where I lived for a few years, most local people thought the way I pronounce my gs at the end of words sounds aggressive merely because they employ a slightly different g, the /x/, in final positions. They may utilize it in certain other positions as well, but I’m fairly sure they do no such thing in a word like chaos. I may be wrong, though.

I decided to investigate this further, and I think I may have found a possible explanation.

• If I force myself to pronounce echt with a clearly pronounced /t/, I do indeed find myself slightly more likely to use the /x/, although by no means as any kind of constant. This may very well be affected by my knowledge that it is more or less supposed to be this way, however, and I’m not sure if I would normally have done this at all.
• In normal usage, however, I’m more likely to either drop the /t/ or to come really close to dropping it, thus rendering echt waar into /ɛɣʋar/. I postulate that this might aid to preserve the /ɣ/ in my speech, at the possible expense of other phonemes that might weaken it.
• Nevertheless, I fully retain the /ɣ/ in acht, and also in things like acht gulden.
• As far as I can tell, Utrecht (or sometimes pronounced as Utrech), [ˈʏtrɛx(t)], is the only word in which the /x/ is actually established in my speech. I wonder if living there for a year might have affected my pronunciation of the name of the city, while leaving the rest of my speech unscathed, or if I’ve always pronounced it that way.

This unscientific analysis would not be complete if I didn’t add that some words, such as Michiel, and vliegje are pronounced with the /ç/. In other words, [mɪçil] and [vliçjə]. As far as I know any Dutch speaker will pronounce these words the same, though as should be obvious due to the very reason I’m writing all of this, I may be wrong.

In conclusion, save for an almost negligible number of exceptions, I pronounce each and every g or ch that is not pronounced as /ç/ as /ɣ/.

My experience here in Antwerp has been very positive, but there were (and perhaps still are) some amusing language barriers here and there. I’ll mention a few.

I call a fuse a stop. Here it is called a zekering, which I almost exclusively associate with playing around with designing electronic circuitry yourself. So while I completely understand the Flemish usage from that perspective, the first time it came up I had no idea how to communicate what I was talking about. I had to use an explanation about washing machines being broken and leaking electricity before the Flemish person was able to tell me they call that a zekering.

I say, Hoe duur is dat? (How expensive is that?) to inquire about the price of something. One Flemish store owner told me I should stop using that because they consider the implication that something has to be expensive rather offensive. In English it sounds similar to me, but in Dutch as it is spoken in the Netherlands it doesn’t imply anything about something being expensive. Instead they exclusively say Hoeveel kost dat? or Hoeveel is dat? (How much does that cost? or How much is that?). Or at least, so that store owner says.

To me, morgen (morning) is roughly from 6 AM to 12 PM (in English morning has different implications), and middag (afternoon) is roughly from 12 PM to 6 PM. When someone was making an appointment for the voormiddag (fore-afternoon) I assumed they meant something like 12 PM – 3 PM. Instead they meant something like 9 AM -12 PM. Middag (midday) equals noon, i.e. 12 PM, and namiddag means afternoon, exactly the same as in English. It makes a lot of sense, but it’s quite different. In my Dutch Dutch the word namiddag does exist, and means something starting around 3 or 4 PM (or possibly around 2 PM in winter), until the end of the afternoon (i.e. 6 PMish, maybe more like 5 PM in winter, although like I said, our definitions are a little more rigid than in other languages). By logical extrapolation voormiddag would mean the period prior to the namiddag, which would be from 12 PM to 3 PM. According to the dictionary it’s even used like that somewhere frequently enough to be mentioned, though where I’m from we’d talk about early in the afternoon. In conclusion, Dutch and Flemish have distinctly different connotations for the words voormiddag, middag, and namiddag. When I think about the actual meaning of the words (fore midday, midday, and after midday), the Flemish meaning makes more sense, but in its own context the Dutch meaning is equally sensible. There’s a reason the concept is called false friends (like German See and Dutch zee).

Speaking of false friends, there is one thing that never confused me, but that does sound funny to me. Over here tas means cup, akin to German Tasse, but to me it sounds like someone wants to drink a bag of coffee (or some such) if the term is used.

Lastly, I still think it’s somewhat amusing each and every time I see things on sale on €x (aan €x) instead of for €x (voor €x).