Juno: Anyway dude, I'm telling you I'm pregnant and you're acting shockingly cavalier.
Leah: Is this for real? Like, for real for real?
Juno: Unfortunately, yes.

The usage of dude as male is still around as in:

• Dudes (i.e. men) Who Wear Skinny Jeans
• Former Governor Sarah Palin's reference to her husband Todd Palin as the "First Dude" (don't hate me because I watched her nomination speech)
• Dudes aren't into birth control - explaining while we may not see male birth control pills being developed

I'm curious if a third person reference to female dudes is possible (e.g. "Dudes who are knocked up"). So far entering "dude" and "pregnant" has mostly turned up references to males including The Dudes Guide to Pregnancy: Dealing with Your Expecting Wife and, of course, pregnant males.

So what are my thoughts? While I'm not sure it would be something I would do, it may or may not be too drastic. A lot depends on whether the parent, computational linguist d'Armond Speers spoke ONLY in Klingon or BOTH Klingon in English. The original story from the Minnesota Daily says only Klingon, but a comment from Ultralingua (who uses Speers as a consultant) claims it was both Klingon and English.

Given that Speers is said to be a linguist and that news articles often distort linguistic issues, I will give Speers the benefit of the doubt. Even if he only spoke Klingon, I will assume that other relatives used English, so his son would be in a bilingual environment. That means, that I think it's safe to assume that the son did acquire English. (P.S. According to Wired, his wife used English so that their son could become bilingual)

What about the Klingon acquired? One question I had is how different the phonology would be from English. In theory Klingon has non-English sounds...but again there are no real native speakers of Klingon. For most adult speakers, I am assuming that Klingon in the U.S. is essentially spoken with a U.S. English accent (and local accents elsewhere). I don't know what Dr. Speers Klingon accent is like, but I will assume HE learned it as an adult and that his native language(s) will impact his Klingon phonology.

I would have the same question about morphology and syntax. Although there are non-English features built in to Klingon, again the fluent speakers are almost all adult learners (who probably use it in limited circumstances). I suspect that local language features creep in.

The result may actually be something like a creole Klingon, similar to creoles in the Caribbean, Africa and the South Pacific. These are the result of children being exposed to pidginized European languages. In many cases, particularly in the South Pacific, we know that the result is a language with a European lexical items but with lots of Austronesian features included (words, grammatical structure, changes in pronunciation). These features are one reason why an English creole like Tok Pisin is unrecognizable from standard English

Another question is whether the child will maintain Klingon or not. In theory he could remain bilingual...but I suspect he will begin to encounter "negative attitudes from his peer group" in elementary school if not sooner. That is, if he speaks Klingon with other children, few will understand and there may be serious jeering involved. We do know from research that if your peer group does not use a form and/or expresses a hostile attitude, the child will NOT be motivated to maintain it. Both is pretty fatal. There is a good chance the Klingon fluency will be diminished from lack of overall use.

The truth is that the "Klingon community" has a hard battle. Obviously, its nobody's native language, and unlike other minority languages, few professional linguists are interested. They tend to worry more about languages with longer histories and actual native speakers which are in danger of becoming extinct. The fact that the language is associated with a "fringe" culture gives it even less credibility.

We linguists may be acting a little closed minded though. Clearly someone cared enough about this language to pass it on. And it is not the first time an "artificial language" has been acquired by children - I have heard that some children have been taught Esperanto from birth. One commenter says that some people meet and marry through learning Esperanto, so that Esperanto would become the household language. Again I assume that an Esperanto speaking child would eventually become bilingual in some other language (because I am really not aware of a large-scale monolingual Esperanto community).

I do think it is worth investigating the Esperanto phenomenon, because we would be seeing another way to create a "new" fully human language. Ironically though, I think if more Esperanto native speakers are born, Esperanto will do the one thing it's not supposed to do - develop into local dialects and begin to get the irregularities that other human languages have.

P.S. - Actual Results

Trust Wikipedia to have additional information. Apparently this experiment was attempted in the late 1990s, but as expected the child Alec eventually chose English as his main language. The article also reports that there were many missing lexical items in Klingon including table and pacifier. If this were like other dual language scenarios, I suspect that Klingon would be acquiring a lot of English borrowings....

Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Smithsonian; First Edition edition (October 7, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 006136925X
ISBN-13: 978-0061369254

Review

One of my Christmas gifts last year was Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling (Hardcover) by David Wolman. It's obstenaibly a history of English spelling, but really it's a history of English spelling reform. That is, if you are curious as to why there's an "e" in Phoenix, this book may or may or may not have an answer. But if you've ever wondered why they have to keep teaching this spelling in school even though the "e" is not really pronounced...then this book is for you.

One thing I like about this book is the hard-nosed attitude towards English spelling. Wolman is one of the many people in modern society who's been chided all his life for his non-mastery of the crazy rules of English spelling. He's realized that it's not that he is who is lacking logic...rather it's the English spelling system that could use some reform. He, along with many in the English spelling reform movement, ask if it is really necessary to burden our children with learning the difference between 'night' versus 'knight' when 'nite' works just fine.

Of course spelling reform is easier conceptualized than implemented, especially in a society which has forgone an official language board. This is a history of spelling rule formation, disintegration and call for reform. The book begins in the Old English period when spelling was something scholars made up as they went along, but at least it was phonetically consistent.

It moves quickly through Middle English when French brought some new spelling conventions to England to the era of printing, which is where most of the problems began. Widespread literacy requires a standardized spelling, but the codifiers were actually just printers trying to get a publication to press. Occasionally, they may have been Dutch printers at that who guestimated English spelling convention. Combine that with the fact that English already had both English and French spelling rules and was going through some serious sound shifts, and you will end up with a decidedly quirky system.

The rest of the book runs through different standardization and reform events ranging from Samuel Johnson who created the first modern English dictionary to Noah Webster who created the first American English dictionary and advocated some reforms...some of which stuck (e.g. plow vs plough). The chapters cover other major figures including Benjamin Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt and others. Many have really, really tried, but usually with limited success.

The story ends with one mechanism which may actually cause reform to happen - the Google spell checker. The difference between Google and other efforts is that Google treats spelling like a socially defined convention. In English, most people spell the dark period after day as "night", but maybe you also want "nite". Google pulls up both if its database think they are alternate spellings. Wolman also notes the tactful way Google gives a suggested correction. Google never says yells or gives an error if you type "frend" instead of "friend", but merely asks "Did you mean 'friend'? when you type "frend". Usually the answer is "Uh...yeah", but it's a relief Google doesn't make fun of you or mutter under its breath about the decline of the English language.

And interestingly, ...you may really mean "frend" either as an obscure word (e.g. the FREND spacecraft arm or director Charles Friend) or even as a check to see if speakers are using "frend" as an alternate spelling of "friend" (they are). Wolman argues that Google was instrumental in persuading some spelling authorities that spelling "r(h)ubarb" would not cause the end of the world, and might be...acceptable.

Ending with Google is interesting because spelling or any writing is really an arbitrary set of conventions...which people like to mess with for purposes of establishing linguistic identity. This is why the Pan Celtic word for three - /tri(:)/ is spelled as trí in Irish, trì in Scottish Gaelic (see the accent flip) tree in Manx, but just tri in Welsh and try in the modernized Cornish spelling system (Heaven forbid the European languages use the same spelling system).

In the end though, why shouldn't Google decide? It's much more democratic, and probably will have more acceptance than anything an official panel will decree. And it will be gradual enough to please those attached to the old forms. Nothing rouses outrage so much as a full-blown replacement of "corrected forms." English spelling will probably be never fully "fixed", but it would be nice if there were a better way to tame it.

My Rating

I would say a 4 out of 5. Ironically, I would have liked more discussion of some of the quirks of English spelling. Not so much to maintain them, but to help current speakers understand what is going on (hint: it's usually a question of language origin plus some sound shift rules).

On the other hand, I am happy with any book from a non-linguist who understands that language is not made of up grammatical decrees.

Who's right? Most of the Americans agree it's to use the authentic Spanish (or at least Latin American Spanish) pronunciation, but Toby countered that no one pronounces Mexico as /mehiko/, but as Anglicized /mɛksɨko/ - good one Toby.

Although I do tend to attempt authentic Spanish pronunciation of words, the argument points out that this is more of a U.S. custom than a U.K. one. However, Toby's point about the pronunciation of Mexico points out that there are lexical exceptions even to this rule. Some Spanish words (e.g. canyon, Mexico, Argentina not to mention Arizona, Colorado, Montana, rodeo) are so ingrained into English that even Americans have nativized the pronunciation.

It is good etiquette these days to pronounce foreign words as close to their original pronunciation as possible. For instance, Toby also commented that no one in English says Barcelona with a Spanish "th" /θ/, but of of his colleagues said she did. Ironically though, in Catalan, Barcelona (and Barcelona IS In Catalonia) may actually have an /s/. So...when playing this game, be sure you do have all the facts or the ghost of Toby Young may laugh in your face.

The tapes are primarily open-ended conversations or speeches, but the extensive metadata gives you a good context of who, what and when. Many of these were recorded on site, so audio quality for spectrographic analysis is probably hit or miss, but it does have some good samples, and they are available in the .wav format as well as MP3 and Real Player. Note also that samples were recorded across a period of several decades (from the 30s to the 80s), so dialects in that area may have changed since the original recording.

However, they are freely available for educational or research use, so that's a major benefit. This collection was organized by the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), so I am happy to see this as a use of our tax dollars at work.

Each one of us needs to make ourself more knowledgable.

That's right - the reflexive "ourself" is singular even though it's a second person plural pronoun. This was a new one for me, but actually consistent with other aspects of spoken grammar. As you might guess, this is not "correct grammar", but actually within this dialect perfectly correct. Examining the sentence, you notice that the speaker is using a distributed plural meaning that each member acts individually, hence on his or her own (or in colloquial English..."on their own."

I am reasonably confident that if the speaker had said "We have to work together to make ____ knowledgeable", the pronoun would probably have been "ourselves".We rarely distinguish this in formal English except sometimes in singular/plural direct objects:

The team members need to bring their trophy ("trophy" singular).
The team members need to bring their uniforms ("uniform" plural)

But spoken English is more subtle about the distinction. Another example on the Web was "Then we will have to do it on our own/by ourself." Of course, this was immediately corrected by a grammar expert. But interestingly, the first speaker was quite perplexed as to why one couldn't use "by ourself."

I have to admit that my grammar has a singular "themself" which specifically refers to an unknown individual (replacing the more cumbersome "himself or herself"). My grammar also has singular "they" instead of the formal "him or her" as well as singular "their" replacing "his or her". As in:

Anyone who looks at themself (himself/herself) on camera all day will be concerned about appearance.
Anyone living away from parents will eventually have to do their own laundry.

When I write, I am careful to use the plural consistently so that I can use true plural "they" (since I refuse to default to "himself"). However, the more precise grammar is the spoken grammar which distinguishes distributed plurals (members acting independently) from plurals in which members act collaboratively.

Royal "Ourself"

There is an official version of "ourself" defined in Merriam-Webster which is the reflexive of the Royal We used by a monarch. So if the monarch wishes to dine alone, he/she (or they) might say "We will dine by ourself this evening." However, I am not sure that the Royal We is used much in current English. Even the Queen of England in interviews appears to refer to herself as "one" rather than any first person.

Acronym Variations

But the proliferation of new tech words (or tech neologisms) shows how differences can arise. For instance today in a class I'm teaching, I discovered that "Web 2.0" had two variant pronunciations - "Web 2 point 0" and "Web 2 0" (no "point"). One student further intoned that dropping the "point" was much hipper (interesting).

Another one with variant pronunciations is "SQL" (structured query language) which I was taught as "S Q L", but others as "Sequel". The most interesting one may be "RSS" because no one can remember what "RSS" stands for - either Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. It doesn't matter though because the lexical entry is now RSS /arɛsɛs/.

Maybe this shouldn't surprise us because so many tech words are introduced to us from print resources. Even if we get to a YouTube source, I suspect that most of us see these terms online in a blog, tech review, documentation, listserv or e-mail. These don't normally come with pronunciation guidelines (or if they do, they're best guesses). That is, programmers may invent new acronyms, but they rarely publish pronunciation guidelines. The only way to get an "authentic" pronunciation would be to hear a presentation from a development team.

What's that gadget?

Another source of confusion may come gadgets with no official name like this one below:

A flash drive/jump drive/USB drive/keychain drive. Image courtesy Fredo Alvarez. Licensed by Creative Commons.

This thingamabob is known as a jump drive/flash drive/USB drive/thumb drive depending on the speaker. Actually the first time I saw it it was described as a neat device that plugged into a USB drive and that you could put on your keychain. So for me, it became a "keychain drive" (and apparently for other people as well - although I think I am the lone "keychain driver" speaker at Penn State.)

Surprisingly, I don't recall any major marketing campaigns for this - word of its existence seemed to spread by word of mouth. These are the circumstances which could promote multiple variants, but it really is amazing how many developed in such a short period of time (since about only 2002 or 7 years).

Although we are connected by media, apparently we don't always use it to propogate "official" usage information. In fact, in the new age of Facebook/texting/Twitter/YouTube/multiple cable channels, I would predict that more variations will evolve over time. Unlike 50 years ago, we can't assume that a large segment of Americans will be watching the same show (e.g. I Love Lucy) because there are so many more options. Despite the ubiquity of these technologies, they are actually serving to Balkanize us at the moment.

The difference may be that not all communities will be geographically contiguous - we've seen this somewhat before (e.g. educated people speaking Latin or French across Europe), but I don't think on the scale we're seeing now.

Wells makes some interesting comments on how old-fashioned the phonetics instructor (A. Lloyd James) sounds. It is amazing how even the "standard" has significantly shifted in 50 years. What's interesting to me though is that I actually find the Sri Lankan speaker far easier to understand than the instructor (or the newspaper vendor). Apparently, I've had more exposure to speakers from South Asia than this variety of British English.

I have no explanation for the instructor's advice to "change the rhythm." It's not a recommendation most linguists would make today, certainly not in terms of "Morse code." However, now that Professor James has mentioned it, it is true that there is a longer pause between phonological phrases in English than the Sri Lankan student. I think the professor is trying to point out that in the address "48 Paddington Road, Edgeware Road" there is a pause in English (indicated by the comma) which the Sri Lankan speaker is not always making. I guess that "pause" is supposed to make the difference. To me, the change sounded very miniscule though.

In fact, in the student's second attempt, he only inserts pauses in the address. The rest of his sentence has the same "rhythm" has before!

If you don't know the plot, Eastwood plays a retired Detroit auto worker Walt Kowalsky with politically incorrect views on a lot of things, including his Asian neighbors (fortunately, he learns toleration, but in an interestingly unsentimental manner). It turns out that his neighbors are part of the Hmong culture as one of the younger women Sue Lor (played by Ahney Her) explains to Clint.

In fact, she even says the name "Hmong" where "hm" is a voiceless or aspirated /m/ which I will transcribe as /mʰ/ (and "ng" is really the velar nasal /ŋ/). In an aspirated nasal, the vocal cords do not vibrate continuously through the /m/ but pause at some point. From what I could tell, the vocal cords begin as non-vibrating, but then begin during the nasal. It would be consistent from how voiceless nasals are pronounced in other languages of Burma.

So the transcription for "Hmong" is actually or /mʰɔ̃ŋ/ (not sure about the tone), but to my ears it sounded like "Mong" /mɔ̃ŋ/ with a slight pause in the beginning. Very interesting. It's another happy example of how linguistic sensitivity is slowly creeping into Hollywood.

P.S. I also have to respect a movie that shows how effectively a Hmong grandmother can spit a wad of tobacco. Needless to say, Walt was impressed in spite of himself.

While the other two specials were somewhat serious programs on what goes into protecting and transporting the president, I was struck at how humorous much of the carrier jargon was. The list of terms I remember were

• Ouija board - a replica of the decks with all the planes on the decks. They are moved on the board as planes land, takeoff or go into maintenance.
• Grape - a member of the aviation fuel crew who are designated with purple jerseys<.li>
• Knee-Knocker - It's the part of the plating between the floor and the lower part of the hatchway. If you don't pay attention, you will knock your knees over the hatchway

We normally military jargon with arcane acronyms (e.g. "CJCS" aka Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff) and terms like "campaign, friendly fire, tactical air support" which abstract away from the fact that the goal and result of combat is usually destruction.

But terms like these show the other side of the military as a bunch of people just trying to make it through the day and aware of the irony of the military lifestyle. Other terms I have heard in my day include the immortal FUBAR ("...beyond all recognition"), BUF (the B-52 bomber called the "Big Ugly Fella" or something else) and GIB (the weapons system officer on a combat plane or "guy in back").

Behind every warrior who has been glorified or feared lies a very large support and cleanup crew.

Alas, the list is still a little skimpy, so while I'm on the subject, I'm asking myself to why it is so hard to film a good adaptation of medieval and ancient stories. I think we've all sat through some very expensive, very unwatchable movies. My personal unfavorites include Oliver Stone's Alexander (which not even Angelina Jolie could save), a 1990s TV miniseries of Cleopatra (too bored to look this up) and well First Knight (sorry it was King Arthur by the book to me).

I suspect that the problem is finding that balance between authenticity and cheesy entertainment. Although we may now find these pre-modern interesting in terms of universal themes vs the original culture, it should be remembered that many were actually meant to popular entertainment much like Gossip Girl, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek and 24. In other words, larger than life and full of drama/comedy or both (and if social criticism comes into the mix... so be it).

For me the best adaptations include authentic touches (costumes, locations, events), but don't forget the include the swagger of the original. In fact, I've been very happy with adaptations that stray from the original...as long as the original themes have been kept. For instance, Excalibur is the only King Arthur movie to include an ancient Celtic language spell (just the wrong one though). And although Excalibur is neither purely medieval or purely post-Roman, it doesn't really matter because neither was the original. What they did keep was the theme of kingship, the mix of Christian religious purity and Druid magic and kingdom-rocking sex scandals. What else do you need?

So here's a partial list of my favorite adaptations:

Medieval Movies

Skimpy, but oh well

• Beowulf (2007) - Believe it or not, the cheesy 3D works to showcase both the pre-migration Germanic royal hall and the terror of Grendel. Plus, Beowulf comes off as a pretentious braggart who really needs to make a legitimate kill.
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail - No there are no socialism jokes in King Arthur, but there really was an obnoxious gate keeper in the Welsh Arthurian saga Culhwch ac Olwen. I can tell that someone read the Middle Welsh literature, because the same kinds of jokes and parody appear here.
• Charlemagne (1993) - Don't sweat the French title; it's available in English. It may not be entirely accurate, but it gives you the idea of what the secular/Papal politics of the day were. Plus, it has a fabulous Roman bath set which Charlemagne uses a lot. And it has the go-to scene of a candlelit ceremony (the coronation of the Charlemagne, The Pope and 100 candles). The candle-lit ceremony may have been pioneered in King Arthur's wedding in Camelot, but I can't verify that.
• El Cid (1967) - If you want a trip to medieval Spain, I can recommend this forgotten classic with Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren as his wife whose heart El Cid has to win again. Good costumes, lots of intrigue and a few lessons in honor and Christian/Islamic tolerance.
• Lion in Winter (1968) - When only one family runs the kingdom, every little squabble turns into a politico-military crisis. Great costumes combined with medieval barges and frozen bath basin water add period detail, but it's the evilly manipulative dialogue from all the cast that makes it a true winner. For film buffs, this includes a very early Anthony Hopkins as the slightly war mad Richard and Timothy Dalton as the not-so-foppish King of France. The remake with Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close disappointed me, but Jonathan Rhys-Meyers does an excellent King Phillip.

Ancient Movies

• The Trojan Women (1971) - If you want 100% pure Greek drama, this will do the trick. This is a very faithful adaptation of the Eurpides play with Katherine Hepburn as Hecuba, Vanessa Redgrave as Andromache and Geneviève Bujold as Cassandra. But I confess that Irene Papas as Helen steals the show. Although not classically beautiful, one look from her sultry eyes and Menelaus is ready to forgive 10 years of hellish combat (oh well). Alas, the rest of the women face the more common fate of women from the losing side as slaves and concubines.
• Troy (2004) - Yes it diverges from the "novel" (i.e. The Iliad) quite a bit in ditching both the gods as well as Cassandra and Iphigenia. However it preserves the themes quite well. Agamemnon is still an arrogant ass, Helen is still a lonely wife, Paris the spoiled youth, the Trojans still overly confident in their military might and Hector still the noble but doomed hero. I think Brad Pitt does well in conveying Achilles' heroic swagger with the ironic awareness that this will lead to an early death (but with everlasting fame). I also think Eric Bana's Hector does a fabulous job of being both the patriotic warrior and the only one in Troy with enough sense to see what is going to actually happen, just like Cassandra would have. Good archaic Greek sets too - no Ionic pillars here.
• Cleopatra (1963) - The one with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. This movie gets a bad rap for being overbudget and for the one where Elizabeth cheats on Eddie Fisher. However the budget is really put to good use (especially in the sequence where Cleopatra brings all of Egypt to march through Rome). Also, I think Taylor makes the most convincing Cleopatra yet. Alluring yes, but also well-educated and motivated with making Egypt a political power independent (or dominating) Rome. Like the actress herself, most of the men failed to take her seriously...but she got her way in the end.
• Rome (HBO Miniseries) - This is the no-holds barred re-telling of the last days of the Republic. There's a certain amount of silliness (Cleopatra as a tasteless slut?), but it really picks up steam as it moves along. There's discussion in the Latinteach list about which scenes are safe to show in middle school, but this is one in which the R-rated material really, really makes the whole thing work. Polly Walker as Octavian's mother is a blast, but James Purefoy as her sometime lover Marc Anthony has more than a few original antics on display.
• The Last Days of Pompeii (1984) - This TV miniseries hearkens back to the Sword and Sandals days, but it's quite entertaining nonetheless. You can tell it's a 19th century novel because it's primarily the Christian converts who survive, but the individual storylines crossing all socioeconomic sectors of Pompeii are very appealing, and yes the sets are fabulous. When this genre works, it really is a lot of fun.
• Spartacus (1960 and 2004) - The 1960 version with Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Lawrence Olivier is a fine Hollywood classic, but I like the 2004 miniseries with Goran Visnijc quite a bit. Visnijc brings a humbler sensibility as a man who just suffered one too many indignity and rose up to kill his oppressor. He may not have meant to lead the revolution, but he lead it well and with honor...and scared the living daylights out of his masters.

Aside the cheesy sociolinguistic aspect (as documented by Mark Liberman on Language Log), I do think think this does give a little bit of insight into how our grammar treats French (and pseudo French) borrowings.

When analyzing borrowings into a language, it is clear that some languages are a little more privileged than others. For some languages like French, most English speakers will actually make an attempt to pronounce the words "correctly" (the same is true for Spanish in the U.S., but not necessarily outside North America).

For instance, we "know" that French words have stress on the final syllable, drop the final consonant and have /wa/ clusters where English doesn't (e.g. quoi /kwa/, DuBois /dubwa/ and croissant /krwasã/). If you're really talented, you may even try to replicate the nasal vowels such as the one in en suite (/ã swit/) as something like /ã/ or maybe /ãn/, but not plain /an/

On the other hand, if the borrowing is from another language like Hindi, Japanese, Welsh or even a native American language, the same effort isn't usually made (unless an individual speaker knows the language). The reason for the status of French and Spanish is of course due to both proximity and cultural history. There's enough contact between the two populations that many English speakers have developed linguistic tools to categorize and pronounce these words differently.

For instance both French and Spanish introduce /pw/ and /kw/ consonant clusters, particularly consonant+w /Cw/ which are normally not allowed in English. French words are also marked as having word-final stress, even though the normal English stress pattern is NOT word-final stress. In phonological terms this could be considered a "stratum" or an area in the lexicon (mental dicitonary) where the normal rules don't apply.

Depending on the level of contact a stratum can become very developed. English technical borrowings with Latin and Greek rules have a class of rules and even suffixes/affixes all to themselves which apply only to Latinate words (One is the alternation of "c" between /k/ and /s/ as in "electric ~ electricity".

The French part of the grammar isn't that robust in English, but it does have the traditional property that it's NOT 100% accurate of real French grammar. For one thing, there are limits in how much authentic French phonology we can accommodate. Few English speakers will pronounce French "u" in the correct way - as the front vowel /y/ or /ü/ depending on your transcription system. It's very hard for English speakers to distinguish unless they have special French class training.

Also, there are errors in implementation in our English pseudo French versus real French. A classic example is the cold potato soup vichyssoise which in French grammar is pronounced with a final /z/ or /viʃiswaz/. A lot of waiters who didn't take all four years of high school French though routinely drop the final consonant (i.e. /viʃiswa/)...because that's what happens in the French stratum.

The one from the McCafé ad I noticed was how the final "e" always became "é" or /e/ "eh" with a stress. Hence "cubicle" /kubikəl/ becomes cubiclé /kubikle/ and "shuttle" /ʃʌtəl/ becomes shuttle /ʃʌtəle/ . Ironically though, in actual French spelling the "e" in "cle" and "tle" would actually be dropped altogether. Hence "cubicle" would be /kubikl/ and "shuttle" might be the really exotic /ʃytl/. Try saying that early in the morning over your McCafé

I also have to applaud McDonald's for one more thing. In the past few years French has been a neglected cultural resource (even on the Food Network). It's nice to know there's a marketer out there who's willing to bring back some old-fashioned mystique français (or is that mystique française?).

P.S. Technically "French magic" is la magie française. while la mystique is mysticism. Did I mention that borrowings can undergo change in word meaning?

For instance, John Wells asks the important question of why Ali G (Sasha Baron Cohen) is spelling Brüno with an umlaut, when it should be plain Bruno according to German spelling convention.

Wells mentions the common metal umlaut (e.g. Mötley Crüe, Motörhead), but argues that Brüno isn't really part of metal culture. Two commenters beat me to the punch in pointing out the Häagen-Dazs also has a fake umlaut and one commented that an umlaut looks "uber-German" (shouldn't that be "über German"?). In other words, the metal umlaut has expanded in our ditzy Anglophone collective culture to include anything vaguely Germanic. Maybe it should be the "Fake Eurotrash Umlaut."

Actually a more interesting phonetic feature that struck me was the quasi-breathy phonation in the movie trailers. Phonation refers to how the vocal cords can be adjusted to pronounce vowels in different ways. Most vowels in world languages are pronounced in a "normal" (unmarked) voiced fashion or whispery, but a few languages can make them creaky (like a creaky door) or breathy (like Marilyn Monroe, but more extreme).

In the Brüno trailers, the announcer has gone with the breathy option, especially when he says "Brüünoo is rated aaaR!". Ironically the transcription for breathy Brüno CAN include umlauts, but they are beneath the vowel, not above it. So breathy Brüno would be /brṳno̤ / (more or less).

In addition to the basics, you can find information on language communities by state, county and even zip code. If you really want to check it out, I recommend viewing data from the Los Angeles area. It's probably as linguistically diverse as New York.

As a fun class exercise, I just took the basic U.S. map showing concentrations of non-English speakers (bluer = higher percentage of English speakers) then asked students to guess which language communities were being represented. Another fun exercise would be to have people look up the third largest spoken languages in different regions. Overall in the U.S., the third largest is Chinese, but in Pennsylvania it's German (and Tagalog (Phillipines) in California).

P.S. I should note that today the map is hanging when collecting data, but Internet speeds have been slow in general...hopefully it's a temporary glitch. If the map isn't working, you can retrieve the raw data by clicking "Tabular View".