Safire on "nukular"

[Dennis R. Preston]

arnold,

Cut Pinker a break; he doesn't know anything about language. It's
Safire who should be excoriated (cool word!) for asking a psycho
instead of a linguini about language.

dInIs

PS: I also almost had an accident when I read that Pinker called it
"metathesis"! For nonlinguists (e.g., Pinker), it appears to mean
something like "sounds aren't in their expected (i.e., standard)
order and/or some goodies are stuck in or took out.

>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)


--
Dennis R. Preston
University Distinguished Professor of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages
A-740 Wells Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824
Phone: (517) 432-3099
Fax: (517) 432-2736
preston at msu.edu