22609: DeGraff on Ms. Grey's linguistic claims (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Michel DeGraff <degraff@MIT.EDU>


> Well, I guess you will have to come here and tell all the people in
> Jacmel they are saying my name wrong.

That's not the point.  If Grey is right, "all the people in Jacmel"
(including my mother, who is from Jacmel?!?) would be pronouncing
Grey's name as she herself says it.  If so, then they're saying it
"right" and indeed they are "accommodating" Grey: after all, she has
the right to call herself, and be called, whatever she so desires.
It's just that the pronunciation "MAM-bo KA-ti", with stress on the
first syllable of each word, follows English rules, not Haitian Creole
rules.  Let me repeat what I already said and what Grey does not seem
to appreciate: In Haitian Creole, word stress regularly goes on the
last syllable as in "man-BO ma-RI"... unless Grey is right and all of
us---Haitian Creole speakers and linguists---have been wrong all along
in our pronunciation and analyses.

> Oh please, surely you are not suggesting that thousands of Jacmel
> residents change their speech for my sake!

If Grey is right in her claims on Haitian Creole phonology, then her
ear for Haitian Creole and her linguistic acumen must be vastly more
accurate than those of every single (Haitian and non-Haitian) linguist
who has described and analyzed Haitian Creole phonology before her.
If Grey is right, then every single book on Haitian Creole will have
to be revised to incorporate her finding on Haitian Creole stress.

As it turns out, Haitian Creole speakers from Jacmel---the very region
where Grey has collected her data---were sampled and recorded for
Dominique Fattier's (1988) 6-volume _Atlas Linguistique d'Haiti,
Cartes et Commentaires_ (distributed by Presses Universitaires du
Septentrion, Villeneuve d'Ascq, France).  Fattier, like scores of
linguists before her, only notes the pronunciation "manbo" with stress
on final syllable (Fattier 1998: vol.2, p.588).  Again, the word is
pronounced as the consonant "m", followed by the nasal vowel indicated
by "an" (no "n" there), followed by the consonant "b" then followed by
the vowel "o".

NB:  In passing, re the surprising claim by "Anonymous" that:

> it is very difficult not to pronounce manbo as mambo...  go ahead
> and try... whether blan or haitian... go ahead... the lips quite
> naturally come together between the N and the B so as to sound like
> MB and not as NB...  if you really want to pronounce manbo as maNBo,
> you have to concentrate to keep your lips apart between the n and
> the b... i do, anyway...  and that is not how people talk...

There is no consonant "n" as such in the word "manbo": "Anonymous" may
not have realized that "an" in Haitian Creole's official orthography
stands for exactly one sound, namely the nasalized counterpart of the
vowel "a" (as in, e.g., "manman" where there is no "n" to pronounced
either).  So his/her entire argument is way off the mark: there is no
"n" to be pronounced before the "b" in "manbo".

In the meantime, as a linguist and Haitian Creole speaker, I have a
simple and straightforward empirical question for Grey regarding the
variety of Haitian Creole with word-initial stress as spoken by "all
the people in Jacmel":

  What other (bisyllabic) words in that Jacmel Creole, besides
  "MAM-bo" and "KA-ti", bear stress on their initial syllables?

Looking forward to a straightforward empirical answer in the form of a
list of words with said stress pattern (i.e., stress on the first syllable),

                        mi-CHEL (with stress on last syllable)

___________________________________________________________________________
MIT Linguistics & Philosophy, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge MA 02139-4307
degraff@MIT.EDU        http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/degraff.home.html
___________________________________________________________________________