Ascending Interrogative Imitation
I am often fascinated by the inflection and rhythm of a talker when I overhear conversations, listen to radio and TV, and even sometimes when I’m engaged in conversation. With the latter, fascination makes it way too easy to miss what’s being said to me; so I have to be careful. Thinking way back to my earliest lessons on dissecting the English (American) language - somewhere in the elementary school days - I remember the teacher talking about how “the voice voice goes up at the end of a questioning sentence.” I really don’t remember anything else about that lesson, but that particular rule is clanging around inside my brain these days because of something I heard last week.
Fans of the NPR radio show, “Car Talk,” regularly are treated to a caller’s imitation of a car sound - often with much coaxing from hosts Tom and Ray. The imitations are frequently good for a chuckle or two, if nothing else (a really good one can take the hosts from zero to “peeing my pants” in an instant). Often they do actually help to diagnose the car’s problem. A couple of weeks ago I heard something in one of the imitations that got me to a-thinkin’.
The caller was asked to try to make the sound her car was making: “RrrrrrrrrrrrRrrrrrrrrrrrRrrrrrrrr,” she rasped. Probing further, trying to diagnose whether or not the sound was connected to engine speed, Car Talk Guy asks, “If you speed up, does the ‘RrrrrrrrrrrrRrrrrrrrrrrr’ go to ‘RrrrRrrrRrrrRrrr?’”
Audio clip: Ascending Interrogative Imitation, from Car Talk
What made me chuckle was hearing the pitch of his imitation go up at the end of this interrogative sentence - following the rule I learned as a kid. The funny thing about this to me is that there was a teeny, tiny inconsistency in that sentence if you look at it from a certain point of view. And, of course, that’s exactly where my mind went: If the purpose of an imitation is to try to sound just like the imitated thing, and the thing was not asking a question when it made the sound, then putting the imitation at the end of a question requires changing it so that it sounds like a question. You have to make your “voice go up at the end.” That immediately makes the imitation less accurate but more funny. At least, that’s how I see it.
In the case of the car on Car Talk, I’m guessing it wasn’t asking a question at all. It was probably saying the automotive equivalent of, “OhMyAchingBack!”
Fans of the NPR radio show, “Car Talk,” regularly are treated to a caller’s imitation of a car sound - often with much coaxing from hosts Tom and Ray. The imitations are frequently good for a chuckle or two, if nothing else (a really good one can take the hosts from zero to “peeing my pants” in an instant). Often they do actually help to diagnose the car’s problem. A couple of weeks ago I heard something in one of the imitations that got me to a-thinkin’.
The caller was asked to try to make the sound her car was making: “RrrrrrrrrrrrRrrrrrrrrrrrRrrrrrrrr,” she rasped. Probing further, trying to diagnose whether or not the sound was connected to engine speed, Car Talk Guy asks, “If you speed up, does the ‘RrrrrrrrrrrrRrrrrrrrrrrr’ go to ‘RrrrRrrrRrrrRrrr?’”
Audio clip: Ascending Interrogative Imitation, from Car Talk
What made me chuckle was hearing the pitch of his imitation go up at the end of this interrogative sentence - following the rule I learned as a kid. The funny thing about this to me is that there was a teeny, tiny inconsistency in that sentence if you look at it from a certain point of view. And, of course, that’s exactly where my mind went: If the purpose of an imitation is to try to sound just like the imitated thing, and the thing was not asking a question when it made the sound, then putting the imitation at the end of a question requires changing it so that it sounds like a question. You have to make your “voice go up at the end.” That immediately makes the imitation less accurate but more funny. At least, that’s how I see it.
In the case of the car on Car Talk, I’m guessing it wasn’t asking a question at all. It was probably saying the automotive equivalent of, “OhMyAchingBack!”
Labels: language, observations
posted by The O at
6:55 PM
3 Comments:
Coolness. I actually heard that episode, but I didn't notice the things you did.
I wish I'd had a class in linguistics somewhere along the line, but I never managed to take one. I remember learning about tonal languages, like Chinese, where changing the pitch changes the meaning of the word. It's difficult for a speaker of a tonal language to learn a non-tonal language, and vice versa. But English is kinda tonal, in that pitch changes carry grammatical information, like implied question marks.
It's all interesting stuff, too bad I've never studied it.
Speaking of language, it annoys me that, in 2008, some computer programs are still unable to form singulars and plurals properly. This post, for example, had "1 comments". Guys, it just ain't that hard to say
printf("%d comment%s", n, n==1?"":"s");
...Which is all you need to do to get the word right.
I've got whole functions devoted to pluralizing words properly in my program at work. It was while writing those that I realized the word equipment has no plural form. Nobody ever talks about equipments. Words are weird, man.
The other solution is to post a second comment . . . *grin*
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