Actually, reading the news live (I’ve done it) is a very different process than speaking your own thoughts. Broadcasters are usually following a teleprompter or other “cold” copy that they did not have a chance to preview. This means that they don’t know what is coming at them more than a few words in advance. As they are pronouncing a word, they frequently don’t yet know what part of speech it is, because it can change with the context. Newsreaders, therefore, tend to develop a very flat, non-commital style of delivery that would sound very stilted in everday life. But we tend to get used to it on TV and radio.
Think of a movie where there is a scene of a broadcaster reading the news. These scenes rarely ring true, because the actors HAVE read the script, and usually don’t know about the flat, streaming pronunciation trick. This might explain part of the complaint in the OP.
Regarding HAIR-is-ment instead of her-ASS-ment, I think broadcasters were afraid of people thinking they were saying something about “her ass”…Sorry for that one, I’m a pig…Timmy
Well, if you hadn’t been slacking off during your woefully inadequate biology classes, you’d know that there’s no such thing as “devolution,” at least, not in the sense that you mean it.
Of course, in another sense, language is in fact constantly devolving to the next generation of English speakers. Who are going to bend it to their own ends, as is their right. No one has got a copyright on the English language, and you’ve got no more right to dictate what is “proper” English than anyone else who speaks it.
Sorry if you’re offended, sturmhauke, but I was only answering this from you:“I certainly was never taught that emphasis on different syllables indicated different parts of speech.” Of course, if you went to any American school in which English was taught I don’t see how that statement could be true.
Any English teachers out there who would support b]sturmhauke**'s claim that he graduated high school, speaks English, and never heard of the relationship between pronunciation and meaning? You all did a better job of teaching than that, didn’t you?
Not a teacher, but a high school graduate and a college graduate with a degree in (wait for it) English literature. First I’ve ever heard of this rule of grammar, too. How long ago were you in high school English, anyway?
My beef with news media writers/talking heads - think about what you’re saying/writing. I heard a newscast a couple of days ago that stated that two police stations at the Stampede could become a permanent fixture, returning year after year. Way to repeat yourself over and over, guys. (Another culprit of this is advertising - take some time to think about what ads are saying - it gets pretty funny sometimes.)
The interesting thing here is that those who would combine the two pronounciations together would seem to be the ones swimming against the tide; in one of my linguistics textbooks, this very issue was covered. The shift to pronouncing the verb with emphasis on the latter syllable and the noun/adjective with the emphasis on the first syllable started in about the 1700s. At first there were only three words that did this (rebel and, uh, two others I can’t recall at the moment. Record maybe?) whereas now there are hundreds of words that follow this pattern.
There’s no such thing as a ‘wrong’ shift in pronounciation and language shift can’t really be stopped (I also recall a bit from Johnathan Swift railing against the use of contractions) but I don’t know why people would try to remove such a useful contextual clue from a language that is all about context. Try it yourself – The Rebel Alliance just wouldn’t sound right.
It’s the first I’ve heard of it as well, and my degree is in English Teaching. This didn’t even come up in my History of The English Language course…
However, I don’t think I’d notice one pronunciation being favored over another through casual observation. I have difficulty processing certain sounds correctly, so I’m happy enough to be able to differentiate the sound of the letter “t” from “d” or “c” more often than I used to be able to, never mind trying to comprehend stresses or being able to count syllables without using a dictionary (a reason that I have never written a haiku). Oddly enough though, since I rarely have my pronunciation corrected, I must be saying them correctly despite having no idea which part of the words I tend to stress. I can see how it would be annoying to hear people improperly pronouncing words, though.
I graduated high school in 1961. I have about five years of college (off and on – major in journalism), no degree. Some of that, however, was in a (horror of horrors) junior college, and the rest in a small liberal arts college which shall remain nameless, lest the taint of my inferior education reflect on them. Does that invalidate any opinion I might have on an academic subject?
Just read any dictionary published before about 1975 (the date of the Webster’s to which I referred), and you will see distinct shifts in accent in different parts of speech for the same word. That more recent dictionaries don’t do that, as pld pointed out earlier, is, to my mind at least, a shame. I thought it was the responsibility of dictionary editors at least to teach as much as they reflect.
Exactly. It’s all about context. And the spoken word can blur the context if such practices as shifts in pronunciation are removed from the spoken language. News readers may not (as in Tim R. Mortiss’ post) be able to read through their copy before air time, but when a reader sees the term “complex problem,” and the story is not about psychiatry, it shouldn’t be too hard for him/her to infer that the word is an adjective and place the accent appropriately.
Hi ya, Astroboy! Welcome to this thread. Didn’t we get into something similar a few months ago before the Great Hacker Crash? I was using the handle Desert_Larry then. My current username is not a sock, by the way. After the SDMB was re-established in its current configuration I asked for and got permission from the mods to re-register as DesertGeezer. It seemed to fit better, and I feel more geezer-like by the day.
Did I understand you correctly? Did you give up the glorious work of teaching English to kids who’d rather be hanging out at the mall or surfing the net? I hope whatever you’re doing now is more satisfying.
As I remember, I got a little intense with you about some grammatical issue (I’m like that sometimes – when I go it’s balls out, even if I’m wrong) and called you out in the Pit, whereupon you made me look more jerky and less erudite than I would have liked. I don’t recall the specifics now, but there’s still smoke rising from my keypad, Or is that dust?
Anyway, I had a writing teacher who was especially mindful of what she called “putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable.” Which, now that I think of it may be a little odd for a writing teacher. I wonder if you concur that pronunciation is important, or this important. And if not, why not? I know arguments about language are about as winnable as arguments about gun control. That’s why this is in the Pit to begin with instead of GD. At any rate, I shall defer to your (I assume) credentialed expertise and fade into the ether – until the next time I get a wild hair up my ass.
The answer isn’t very difficult to discern. In the 33 years between your high school graduation and mine, the language has changed somewhat. You’ll note I never said that I don’t know of any relationship between pronunciation and meaning. Instead, I said I hadn’t heard of the specific instance of different syllable emphasis for different parts of speech. I hardly think that the rather subtle difference between “complex” and “complex” constitutes a “gross mispronunciation” or a “butchering of the language”. It’s not as if people are saying “coompleeks”, or “the space launch complicated at Cape Canaveral”.
You’re probably right, sturmhauke. I do tend to use hyperbole perhaps more than is really called for. My rant was against those I think provide a poor example. It just seems to me that, although language does change, it doesn’t improve. It might if people in the media whom we hear every day provided a better example. I know I focused on news readers/anchors in my OP, but actually the writers and announcers of TV commercials are the worst possible example. And they do have the opportunity to read over their copy before taping. I suppose expecting the ideal is expecting too much, but the less we expect, the less we’ll get.
By the way, the word sturm (with an umlaut over the “u”) means storm in German. Any special significance to the moniker? Just curious.
