Safire on "nukular"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

Safire's "On Language" column of 3/20/05 has a segment on "nucular"
that strikes me as pretty confused.  It also fails entirely to mention
Geoff Nunberg's book _Going Nucular_ and the piece that gave the book
its title (not to mention the various Language Log postings that have
discussed this pronunciation; Googling on "nucular" and "Language Log"
will get you the references).  I would have thought that the title of
Geoff's book would be a pretty clear hint that the pronunciation
"nucular" was going to be discussed somewhere in the volume.

Instead, Safire asked for Steve Pinker's advice, and Steve came up with
a metathesis account -- Safire dutifully defines "metathesis" and
indicates its pronunciation -- that can't be the whole story.  Here's
how he gets into it:
----
Many of us replace an unfamiliar sequence of phonemes (the smallest
units of speech sounds) with a familiar one.  The only other common
word that rhymes with _nuclear_ is the unfamiliar _cochlear_.  But in
our spectacular language, there are dozens of words like _secular_,
_vascular_, _jocular_ and _molecular_, and our brains are tempted to
make _nuclear_ fit that familiar pattern.
-----

Problem 1, a minor annoyance: "the smallest units of sounds" isn't
going to elucidate the notion of "phonemes" to anyone who doesn't
already know what phonemes are.  It's just baffling.

Problem 2, more serious: "an unfamiliar sequence of phonemes".  As
Geoff points out in his book, the /li at r/ at the end of "nuclear" isn't
at all unfamiliar to or difficult for speakers of English: comparatives
like "pricklier" are unproblematic and show no inclination towards
being reshaped.  The problem with "nuclear" isn't phonological but
morphological, and that's why words in "-cular" /kyul at r/ are relevant;
they appear to have some sort of root ending in "c" /k/, followed by
morphological elements "ul" /y at l/ and "ar /@r/, or perhaps an
indivisible "ular" /y at l@r/.  (Back on 7/3/04, in fact,  Alison Murie
suggested on ADS-L that "nucular" might be a reanalysis in which the
root is the word "nuke", and the word "nucleus" isn't involved at all.
And Geoff entertains a similar idea in his article, noting that this
would predict a difference between "nuclear" in things like "nuclear
family" and "nucular" in things like "nucular weapons".)

Problem 3, also serious: getting the metathesis proposal to work.
Metathesis of the /l/ and /i/ of /nukli at r/ would give /nukil at r/, with
primary accent on the first syllable and secondary accent on the second
(as in "nuclear").  To get towards "nucular", that second syllable
would have to lose its accent (this is not particularly unlikely),
yielding /nukIl at r/ or /nuk at l@r/.  This isn't all the way home, though,
because there's still that /y/ to pick up.  It looks like Safire is
assuming a metathesis and *then* a reshaping to match other "-cular"
words, which would supply a /y/.  But direct reshaping is a more
parsimonious account of the phenomenon; the metathesis is unnecessary.

Problem 4, another mere annoyance.  Safire is being sloppy when he says
that "nuclear" rhymes with "cochlear".  It doesn't, because the
accented vowel /u/ of "nuclear" doesn't match the accented vowel /o/ or
/a/ of "cochlear".  ( If *they* "rhyme", then so do "noodles" and
"models".)  Rhyme involves a matching between accented vowels and
everything that follows them.  The pair "nuclear"/"cochlear" is a kind
of almost-rhyme, in which everything that follows the accented vowels
matches. Almost, but definitely no cigar.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)