Mr. Verb

Hermann Zapf has passed away. The NYT obit has a good sketch of his life and work, including designing Palatino and Optima fonts. In linguistics, he has a special place because his Dingbats font provided a face, so to speak, for Optimality Theory (along with Wingdings). Below is a tableau from a paper by McCarthy using several Zapf symbols.


The pointing hand (rightward) is the winning candidate, the 'flower' represents the sympathy candidate, etc. Even the checkmark in the last line is, I think, a Dingbat symbol. The old bomb with a lit fuse was Wingdings, and the oft-used skull and crossbones too, I think ... Zapf was happy stuff and Wingdings the unhappy, maybe, though some people definitely used Wingdings pointing fingers. Ahhhh, those were days.*


There was a joke back in the day that OT was possible only thanks to Dingbats (along with the Mac).

The obituary has some stuff I didn't know about Zapf, e.g. that he did a design for the Cherokee syllabary. >

But one oddity:  The NYT often provides pronunciation guides on names and for Zapf, they give "DZAHFF" (in the print version and the online version this morning).  In German, you would expect [tsapf]. The 'dz' might represent a lenited [ts] and he was from an area where lenition would be possible, if they gave a regional pronunciation. But I take the 'ah' to mean a long vowel, where I think relevant colloquial varieties, like the standard, should have a short vowel, at least in the noun of the same shape (cognate with English tap, as in beer) and there should be an affricate at the end. Anybody knows what's up here?

*Pointing fingers now trigger a bad reaction for many of us in Wisconsin, see here for the reason.

We sometimes watch the Chris Matthews show on MSNBC, just because it's on.  I agree with most of his positions, but man, I do not like him.  Mr. Annoying Interrupter Guy.  But the other night we got a good laugh out of him. He was mentioning something that had been on the Fusion network and said something that I will try to represent without IPA symbols here:

"on the Fyu-zhee-yan Network - I think that's the Spanish pronunciation..."

Oh my god, dude, surely you have assistants who took some Spanish in high school who could have steered you out of that one???

Anyway, I had to look the Fyuzheeyan Network up because I wasn't familiar with it.  I learned that it's a network launched by Univision and ABC that was originally aimed at English-speaking millenials of Hispanic background.  But according to the All-Knowing-Place, they got some bad press for that, and changed their goal: "to 'engage and champion a young, diverse and inclusive America,' regardless of cultural or language background." *

So note to Chris: it's an English-speaking channel.  You can just pronounce "Fusion" in English next time and not embarrass yourself again.

* footnote:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_%28TV_channel%29.  Don't want to Rand Paul it.

Wow, I should not have been surprised by some people in the media stumbling a little on Judge Sotomayor's name — it's unfamiliar to a lot of people and the stress pattern of the Spanish form isn't obvious maybe. But I didn't expect to hear outrage over a modestly Spanish-like pronunciation. Wrong again, as a National Review writer proves here, and this confirms. Mark Krikorian asks about whether to go with the "Spanish pronunciation, so-toe-my-OR, or the natural English pronunciation, SO-tuh-my-er". He clearly wants it anglicized, saying apparently about the native-like stress pattern, "it sticks in my craw":

Deferring to people's own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English.

Unnatural? Limits? SO-tuh-my-er sound utterly horrible to my native English-speaking ear, if we're taking a freaking vote. Having learned about the story from Wonkette (here), there's little left to be said that Wonkette didn't say:

Pronouncing a proper noun in its natural Spanish way “is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.” How is this “giving in to” anything?

I'll let you, gentle reader, click through for the Rest of the Story. (And remember, Wonkette is the very embodiment of 'snark.')



Image from the ToBI folks at Ohio State, here. (If you don't know about ToBI, check it out.)