katealaurel

I’ve been spending part of the day (post-dishes and inside chores) catching up on unread blog posts in Google Reader, as I’ve been ignoring that segment of the internet for a few weeks now. Sifting through back posts in Language Log is usually entertaining, although I tend to save long and complex work to read later (and often ultimately skip them, unfortunately). At the end of my pile, I came across a short and amusing review of Star Trek by Geoffrey Pullum, quoted in part here:

… Of course, this is Language Log, not Science Fiction Movie Log, so to even mention it here I need a linguistic hook. And I don’t have a really good one: there are no alien tongues like Klingon in this film (unless you count the young Chekhov’s sometimes rather heavy Russian accent), and although I spotted some discreet rewording of the famous “seek out new life” prologue, recited before the closing credits, there’s nothing very interesting. But I did notice one tiny thing: a sign on a big assembly of tubes and tanks in the bowels of the Enterprise that said “INERT REACTANT”. I hate to be a pedant here (that’s my day job), but really, was there no one on the set who could point out that a chemical substance is inert if and only if it cannot be a reactant? Am I wrong, chemists?

Perhaps Language Log readers will have spotted more noteworthy linguistic points in the film. Come on, Trekkies, comments are open!

I can’t comment on the chemistry aspect, having last studied the subject midway through high school– it’s thoroughly discussed in the comments, in any case.

The commenters do bring up a linguistic issue I noticed in the film, though: Chekov’s consistent pronunciation of “v” as “w.” (Sorry, linguist friends; I still haven’t sat down and learned IPA.) It didn’t ring wrong to my ears, as a non-speaker of Russian, although it sounded a bit heavy-handed; native Russian speakers, linguists, students of Russian, and all others weigh in at length in the comments, which I won’t reproduce in detail. There doesn’t seem to be a solid conclusion: some Russian speakers and friends of Russian speakers maintain that pronouncing the English “v” as “w” is normal, and others deny it entirely. I don’t know enough Russian speakers to have an opinion.

That said, it piqued my interest because I’m currently grappling with learning Turkish. When staying in Selçuk, a Kurdish friend I met there spent a few minutes trying to teach me to pronounce the Turkish “v” properly (he’d grown up in Van, and was telling me about the city). He described it as being close to the English “w,” but pronounced– to my ears– with an initial consonant somewhere in between the usual English “van” and “fan.” This one I can mimic, by starting to pronounce an English “v,” exhaling slightly as though pronouncing an English “f,” and then finishing the “v.” It takes concentration to do it consistently, and I tend to screw up, but I think I can pronounce it properly if I’m careful.

What I haven’t yet mastered, though, is the Turkish word for “and”: “ve.” This, y’know, seems like an important one to learn. I never got a good handle on how to say it when last in Turkey– Turkish is spoken quickly enough that it was hard for me to pick apart sentences when listening in the street, and I had very few interactions of my own in Turkish that involved complete sentences, as I was even more of a non-speaker at the time. Right now, I’m primarily listening to recordings, although I hope to find a conversational partner when I’m a little more competent. To my confusion, every recording I’ve heard that uses the word “ve” pronounces the consonant in a way that’s almost indistinguishable from the English “v.” My grammar– the older edition of Lewis’s Turkish Grammar– does note that both “v” and “f” are pronounced more lightly than in English (I.5, p. 3), but only describes w-like pronunciations for intervocalic letters.

So where does that leave me? I don’t know. It may well be an inconsistency in the way the language is properly pronounced, or it could be a Kurdish accent on my friend’s part (admittedly, I know nothing about Kurdish and its pronunciation). Or it could just be bad language recordings or an inaccurate ear on my part. An error in pronunciation this subtle isn’t something I’m really worried about right now– I should probably get a handle on conjugating basic verbs first, right? And maybe using nouns?– but oh, it irks me not to even be able to tell what the right pronunciation is. Suggestions from the [v/w/f]ast [v/w/f]oid of the internet?