Happy laxing

[cosmolinguist]

On Friday I learned that one of the features I find most irritating about Mancunian accents is sometimes called "happy laxing" by phoneticians.

Which sounds so Mancunian to me somehow. Maybe just because it sounds a bit like a drug or a band name.

Comments

Tee hee hee

[jesse_the_k]

I love how jargon often results in ridiculous examples.

For those of us without linguistic training, here's a bunch of audio samples of happY laxing etc. The Manchester one is at the end

http://englishspeechservices.com/blog/the-demise-of-happy-laxing/

Re: Tee hee hee

[cosmolinguist]

What a great link, thanks for sharing that.

Re: Tee hee hee

[strange_complex]

Thanks from me too! I kind of wanted to know what it sounded like, but didn't want to put Holly to the trouble of having to type out a definition just for me. Loved the comment after the 'boy' example about how vocal fry used to occur in male speech as well.

[cosmolinguist]

And it absolutely occurs in male speech now, too! I know there's more research about this in the U.S. and Australia but I'm sure it's the case here too. It just seems to be a voice quality that's recently been labeled annoying when it's something young women do, to the extent that many people think only young (ambitious, upwardly mobile, less-feminine-sounding) women do it...I wonder why that could be? Hmm.

[strange_complex]

Yes, I'm sure it does. I guess I meant more "used to be considered actively desirable in male speech" (in the context of RP). Now it would be more a case of passing unremarked in the men, even while being pounced upon disapprovingly in (young) women. :-/

[conuly]

Likewise with uptalk.

[conuly]

There's this very popular OG based (that is, phonics) spelling/reading curriculum, Spalding. It's used in schools and also a LOT in homeschool because it's really, really bare bones, and so it has sort of a cult following.

And the original author had this as part of her dialect, and I guess that was her hill to die on because she doesn't list ee as a pronunciation for the letter i, she accordingly lists i as in kit as a pronunciation for the phonogram ie, and you would not believe the squabbling between Spalding purists and those who say "Fuck it, just tell your kid that there's another sound for the letter i".

This curriculum also says that "words in English do not end in the letter i", and if you raise the point about broccoli, sushi, ski, taxi, bi, etc. you're told that those are loanwords and abbreviations, which is technically true but not terribly useful for a six year old. (And they're still words in the English language.)

Despite those little quirks it's still a useful curriculum, but I never recommend it without recommending a few modifications....

[pseudomonas]

I think saying that they're loanwords is a bit of a cop-out. If you exclude those, I'm not sure what the point being made is? "Words that English inherited from proto-Germanic don't end in i"? That might possibly* be true but it's a bit of an abstruse point.

*The first person singular pronoun "I" ends in "i" if one ignores case. And the greeting "Hi" is I guess slang but not an abbreviation per OED and dates back to the C15. And there's a regular ending for forming demonyms from (some) place names (Yemen→Yemeni;Pakistan→Pakistani;Israel→Israeli)

[conuly]

And yet, the fans get so annoyed when you point out the problems with this argument. Whereas it'd be just as simple - and way more accurate! - to say that the words your child is learning to spell, at their age, are much more likely to end in y or ie than i. Because the six year old child is much more likely to need words like "by" and "cry" than "broccoli" and so on. Hi is still an issue, I guess.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, "they're loanwords so my rule doesn't work on them" is...a weird argument. I learned a few weeks ago that English lost 85% of its Old English vocabulary so...it's 85% loanwords so pardon me for not being impressed with that kind of rule. :)

Not to mention that "what letter words ended with" doesn't make a lot of sense when you go back that far: Old English has a ton of inflections so what letter words ended with depended on how they were used in the sentence. I mean, a ton of them ended with letters (þ and ð) that we don't even have in English any more. But hey, no loanwords! (Until the Christians and the Vikings...)

[conuly]

Yup. It's still the most affordable Orton-Gillingham program out there, and generally well-written, but the author had her shibboleths.

[pseudomonas]

Do you find it more irritating than other accent features because it affects your given name?

[cosmolinguist]

Interesting point! I hadn't thought about it, maybe because it's the other vowel in Holly that causes me so much trouble: I can't say it in a way many British people can understand because my "o" isn't like theirs -- theirs is more rounded, I think? and higher -- and my name being something I have heard so often my whole life it's difficult to change how I say it (this phenomenon is also why I sound so Minnesotan when I say "Minnesota" -- it's a word I'm used to only hearing in midwestern accents :) ).

I don't really know why I find it irritating. Of course it was unfamililar, but most aspects of Manchester accents were when I moved here and this one has stood out for years.