B.A.: “If he’s a raisin, isn’t he supposed to be dehydrated? Or did he run off thirty years ago to become a star and his bunch is just now finding out what became of him?”
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Comics I Don't Understand 
Well…. who ever said the California Raisins were supposed to be healthy role models. Wouldn’t it fit that after decades of the unhealthy lifestyle he ends up like this?
So where’s the usually comment about Geezer tags?
My concern is if being a grape is the health standard this world lives by, then, no, he is *not* going to be fine. He will never be fine again.
Don’tcha know that I heard it through the grapevine.
You might enjoy these fanciful art creations along this theme by Pierre Javelle and Akiko Ida. Pumping up raisins to make grapes is the 7th image.
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/01/11/261435571/go-where-raisins-swell-into-grapes-and-lemons-light-the-sky
That was fun . . . I went to their original site and spent quite some time looking . . . and marveling . . . thanks!
My high school classmate does stuff like that:
https://www.squintpictures.com/collections/eats
woozy, I thought about it; but the commercials stopped airing about 20 years ago, so it didn’t seem to warrant the tag.
I got so hungry for chocolate after viewing the previous that I went to the kitchen and made two chocolate mug cakes.
If the commercials stopped airing 20 years ago, wouldn’t that mean that the tag IS warranted?
Yeah, I just filed this one under “geezer reference” and went on.
The grapes should have been warned off against raisin their expections.
Had I already seen this last night when my brain shut down the TV episode I was watching and launched into a lecture, ** using ‘raisin’ as the central example **, on the idea that you don’t really need a vowel to have a syllable, as any continuant could form a syllabic core? And had everybody repeating ‘raisin’ and challenged them to say what vowel they thought was in the second syllable.
“the idea that you don’t really need a vowel to have a syllable”
Some dictionaries claim “rhythm” has only one syllable, probably because it has only one vowel.
Hey yeah, “rhythm” is a great example. Because in this case the orthography backs up what we hear.
m-w.com shows shows the second vowel in “rhythm” as a schwa: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rhythm
For “raisin”, on the other hand, they use a superscript schwa, which means there is no vowel sound. Which I find odd, because I quite clearly hear “raisin” as “RAY-zin” with a short /i/ in the second syllable. Certainly more of a vowel sound than “rhythm” has.
I get the rhythm example (which has a pronounced bu unwritten shwa… which I consider to be be the equivalent of a vowel)…. but what the heck are you guys talking about with the raisin’ example? The second syllable has both a written and pronounced vowel.
I suppose one aspect of nature is that vowels can have a far wider gradient then any other sounds and may vary even within individuals from the some family and a complete continuum so that all sounds slide to others, so that if one person pronounces the vowel as a dull shwa-like “uh” (Rais-uhn) and another pronounces it a short “i” (as I do) (Rais-in) one would hardly notice…. but what are we supposed to be observing?
Okay reading the wikipedia article on schwas, schwas are *definitely* vowels and considered the most common vowel sound and dead center (o’s, and u’s are low and e’s and i’s are high, I guess).
I suppose the “high schwa” means that it somewhere between a mid schwa. “uh” and a short e or i.
There were examples of schwas written as every vowell including none:
In English, schwa is the most common vowel sound.[5] It is a reduced vowel in many unstressed syllables especially if syllabic consonants are not used. Depending on dialect, it may be written using any of the following letters:
‘a’, as in about [əˈbaʊt]
‘e’, as in taken [ˈtʰeɪkən]
‘i’, as in pencil [ˈpʰɛnsəl]
‘o’, as in memory [ˈmɛməri]
‘u’, as in supply [səˈplaɪ]
‘y’, as in sibyl [ˈsɪbəl]
unwritten, as in rhythm [ˈɹɪðəm]
Which is interesting as I definitely would not include “taken” which I’d pronounce as a short “e” (Other than accentuated stress “taken” is, to me pronounced exactly as “Take N”) or pencil which I’d pronounce as a short “i”. (Other than accentuated stress: Pen Sill, pen’s ill, and pencil; are all prounced the same). And Raisin is pronounced as “Raise in” except with on unstressed “in”.
In a hurry, but noting the new Lexico site (partnership of Oxford Dictionaries and Dictionary.com) gives these pronunciations (in their main Dictionary category, not US Dictionary):
https://www.lexico.com/definition/raisin
https://www.lexico.com/definition/rhythm
rhythm/ˈrɪð(ə)m/
raisin/ˈreɪz(ə)n/
In other words, they parenthesize the schwa to indicate it is optional.
(The US entries have the schwa as obligate.)
I take this to say they recognize there exists a pronunciation with no real vowel.
If you play the recording they provide, I hear it (the raisin one) as exemplifying the way I’m talking about.
Your pronunciation may well have a more definite vocalic segment of a schwa; there’s no denying variation.
Huh, it sounds to me like there are two vowels in that recording of raisin.
Funny, I saw this cartoon and almost sent it in, then Googled
raisin “honey honey yeah”
and figured it out.
I think what Mitch is getting at is if you think about how you pronounce “raisin” (and I’m going now with how I pronounce it, and I’m assuming Mitch does similarly), when you are at the “s”, your tongue is up by the roof of your mouth, only kept from touching it by the stream of air you are forcing out as you vocalize; you then stop the air as the tongue seals firmly to the top of your mouth, and you continue vocalizing, making the “n” sound. So you barely move your mouth at all, and what movement there is is in a closing direction, not in an opening direction, and yet somewhere in that movement there is supposed to be a vowel (with vowels generally understood to be the open mouth part of speech, as opposed to consonants, which are generally thought of as the closed mouth parts of speech). So I get what Mitch was musing about, and I find it interesting too.
(And Mitch, if I’ve misinterpreted, please let me know.)
Maybe I don’t know what you mean by “real” vowel but that recording on the page is a very clearly pronounced “in” in raisin.
larK, isnt that more to do with than nature of the sibilant S rather than the vowel? You get the same effect with an R in “operate” or the E between the C and S in “finances”?
Maybe I don’t understand what you mean. I wish I did though.
My grammar school textbook said that “fire” was a one-syllable word. I never understood that. How about “liar”, “higher”, “friar” and all the other words that rhyme with it?
MiB, listen to a Texan (for instance) talking about the fahrs in Australia. I think it also will rhyme with the one-syllable “tire”.
How many syllables in the word ‘interesting’? I think three, but lots of people seem to think it’s four and defend that to the core of their being.
I think it’s weird that people would say, or believe they would say, “That documentary was very in-ter-est-ting.”
A bunch of grapes walk into a room…
How?
larK: thanks for the explanation. I think I get what you’re saying, but when I say “raisin” I don’t go straight from the stream of air and the “s” sound to sealing my tongue to the top and making the “n” sound. There’s a brief period where my mouth becomes slightly rounder and I let more air out, and expel a short vowel sound. Of course, there are different dialects, but I feel like I hear the same short vowel in the lexico recording. Maybe I’m just hearing what I expect to hear.
Stan: I say “interesting” with either four syllables (“in-ter-est-ting”) or three (“in-trest-ing”) depending on how clearly I’m enunciating.
I did a search for syllables without vowels, and came across a recording on this page of a recording on a word in the Tashlhiyt Berber language that has four syllables without vowels in a row: https://daily.jstor.org/syllables-without-vowels/
There’s a bit of pig-headed righteousness in dictionaries.
I pronounce hire, tire, fire, liar, lyre, higher etc. exactly the same and so does everyone I know. But it’s because a long “I” followed by an “R” is practically impossible without an exasperation as your relax your mouth after the tightening for the “I” but needing to wider for the “R”. But fire, hire, tire, lyre are *suppose* to be one syllable and we aren’t *supposed* to make that ER but you can’t really go “high*stop* RR without gasping for breath. So the dictionaries try to pretend that escaped “igh-ehrrr” didn’t happen. It’s like a fart at a tea party.
“I say “interesting” with either four syllables (“in-ter-est-ting”) or three (“in-trest-ing”) depending on how clearly I’m enunciating.”
Yea, I get that, but I think in those circumstances it’s an unnatural, forced and loaded over-pronunciation. Like so:
(Talking with your friend casually in Starbucks)
“My mother went on holiday to Turkey.”
“Hmmm, that’s in-trest-ing.”
(Your friend’s mother was at your house last week, and your jewelry is missing)
“My mother went on holiday to Turkey.”
“Hmmm, that’s in-ter-est-ing.”
For that matter, you can add syllables to any word when you’re over-enunciating.
“Close the door, please.”
“What?”
“Close the door, please.”
“What?”
“Close the door, please.”
“What?”
“CLO-SE THE DOE-ER, PAH-LAH-EES!”
I think that a four syllable ‘interesting’ is not the way people normally say it, but because it’s such a long word that is easily broken up, people insist that it is so. Maybe not, but I’ve rarely if ever heard anyone say ‘in-ter-es-ting’ in regular conversation.
My older son says “in-ter-est-ing.” Always has, as far as I can remember. Nobody else in the family does.
Similarly, my brother pronounces “coupon” as “koo-pon” rather than “kew-pon.” I always figured some pronunciations just feel more natural to the mouth.
woozy: for “operate” there is too much other movement going on for me for it to be comparable; for “finances” I do open slightly between the c and the s, but that is in order to separate the two s sounds from each other, otherwise it’d just be finansss. I think Winter Wallaby’s comment on “raisin” is useful — he apparently does (I would say) emphasize the “i” part by opening briefly before closing again; I just seem to go straight in to the “n” from the “z”.
As for “fire”, I find it like “power” to be very different between British pronunciation and American — British makes them one syllable words, and American makes them two syllable (Mid Atlantic pronunciation, anyway). I always find it odd in song lyrics when “power” is supposed to be just one syllable (there’s a Sting song I remember mocking for that as a youngster). I like woozy’s comment about the fart at a tea party with regards to dictionaries and the pronunciations I hear.
As for “interesting”, all I can hear is Bugs Bunny doing a bit as a manicurist talking about all the in-tar-est-ing people one meets.
Ooh, let’s not forget “comfortable” and “vegetable” — I know many people who insist on pronouncing every (“ev-ar-ie”) written syllable in them…
“A bunch of grapes walk into a room…”
walkS . . . but I still don’t know how.
And then there are the one-syllable words that some speakers make into two syllable ones, like the Irish pronouncing “film” as “filum” or “filim”…
Steve Martin pronounces it ‘ve-ge-ta-ble’ in his movie, My Blue Heaven. Always cracks me up.
Stan, I agree with the qualitative distinction you make between the two pronunciations, but I apparently have a lower threshold for switching to the four-syllable form.
FWIW, this source says that both three syllable and four syllable forms are currently common, and that the three syllable pronunciation is newer, starting in the 20th century.
Grawlix: “A bunch of grapes walk into a room…”
Andréa: “walkS . . . but I still don’t know how.”
Are you sure? Each grape is apparently individually sentient. I would say “A group of people walk into a room, so I’m inclined to say “walk” for a “bunch of grapes” as well. If the stem prevents them from walking separately, that could push towards the “walks” usage. But not strongly, since I’d say “The conjoined twins walk into a room…”
The subject is ‘bunch’, which is singular.
Andréa: How is it different than a “group of people”?
Not at all different. Except we know how a group perambulates.
Which is why I also pointed out conjoined twins are still a plural subject. I’d say the fact that they’re individually sentient is what makes the subject plural, not the details of the way in which they perambulate.
Additionally, the the nurse and patient show that individual grapes can detach from the bunch and move on their own.
Thanks, larK, for explaining the role of the articulation process. That’s exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of doing, and in fact was half composing in my head while out driving around on some chores Tuesday afternoon — so I was happy to get back and see that you had taken care of it, and I needn’t worry about it further.
Indeed, one reason it’s better that you took care of it is that while I was driving and mentally writing, I had forgotten that raisin was our central example, and I was working on razor instead. That word has a problem for this discussion, since there are many people who speak an r-less dialect, where words that end with /r/ for my dialect and many North American dialects instead end with a neutral vowel, or what is sometimes called “an R-flavored vowel”. (“R-less” is just what it’s called, they do use an American approximant /r/ in positions other than word-end). That’s also why fire is maybe not the ideal case for the “is it a monosyllable?” discussion.
But razor would have had some minor advantages. The articulation movements from /z/ to /r/ are slightly less complex than from /z/ to /n/. Which may or may not have clarified why, in casual rapid connected speech I can let the voiced continuant consonant sounds stand in for an explicit vowel target.
[Also, I was amused by the idea of bringing up the brand name Razr, which I recall as being either a scooter or a phone. But the merchandisers knew what they were doing — a nonstandard form gets attention, but still nobody had any doubts how to say that.]
Winter, I appreciate your summary of, and response to, larK’s articulation account. It’s clear you get, though others perhaps do not, that this discussion is not aiming at “the pronunciation of the word raisin” nor any sense of how articulatory matters force anybody to pronounce the word without a real vowel in the second syllable. It was just an account of how some speakers, most of the time (within casual rapid connected speech) , can be led to not surface an explicit vowel in that position. It’s quite reasonable that this does not apply to you. Besides differences of geographic or social dialects, there are idiosyncratic differences of habit, and of course the circumstances of speech.
All that said, of course my underlying or target form for these words does have a vowel in the second syllable. And it would surface in contexts other than connected speeech, say if I were reading isolated words to a room of schoolkids taking a spelling test.
For those pursuing the “is it a monosyllable?” discussion, the term mora may come in handy.
From https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/mora :
NOUN
1Scots Law
Undue delay in the assertion of a claim, etc.
2Prosody
A unit of metrical time equal to the duration of a short syllable.
3Linguistics
The smallest or basic unit of duration of a speech sound.
In that last sense, it’s a useful weasel word when you don’t want to commit to finding a “whole syllable”. 🙂 So, when you sense that a diphthong is getting stretched out, but don’t quite want to say it produces an extra or separate syllable, you can get by with saying it introduces an additional mora.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Joos
In the late 1960s I encountered this 1962 book “The Five Clocks” by Martin Joos. (BTW, if you look at that Wikipedia page and see most prominently a bullet-point list of five items, those are not the five clocks — they are the different settings he thinks the “register” clock dial can take on.)
When a class I took later did read and discuss this, there was a lot of retraction and reframing from the rising field of sociolinguistics, particularly on characterizing these levels, and generalizing his “style switching” to broader social “code switching” — but the fundamental points held up.
This goes to undermine questions of “How is [the one way] such-and-such is said.” It’s good that several people are bringing up dialect differences and also formality levels.
I think WW has already addressed most of the points in woozy’s main skeptical comment, but a few minor additional remarks may be in order.
larK, isnt that more to do with than nature of the sibilant S rather than the vowel?
Well, (1) please, everybody, bear in mind that while the letter is an s the sound is a z. In this case that’s more than a fussy nitpick, since it’s important that both the z and the following n are voiced continuants. (And all vowels in English are voiced.) This is what lets the rapid articulation still feel like you can check off the box for “did I include a vowel, or at any rate something that can pass for one?”.
(2) I’m not sure the basis for the contrast you mean to draw with that “rather than”. I don’t think either larK or I was claiming something special about the nature oof the vowel. I would agree that it is more due to the nature of the consonants — but both of them, not just the z, and their feature of being voiced, not particularly the z being fricative (sibilant).
You get the same effect with an R in “operate” or the E between the C and S in “finances”
As larK has already said, these aren’t really comparable with the raisin case. However, I think for “finances” he answered for the second syllable, but you were more asking about the third. (1) Here larK’s answer for the second syllable will almost equally apply to the third. However, the two consonants are not identical — the preceding /s/ sound (written “c”) and the trailing /z/ sound (written “s”) are different. But there still might be a “danger” of them merging were it not for an explicitly surfaced vowel to keep them apart. (2) The key point, above, with “raisin” is that the consonants both before and after the vowel are voiced (larynx or vocal cords activated), simplifying the articulatory adjustments. With the last part of “finances” , the preceding /s/ sound (written “c”) is unvoiced and the trailing /z/ sound (written “s”) is voiced. So there might be close timing issues over when the voicing needs to start. (3) Though it’s not my normal pronunciation, I can purposely say “finances” with the third syllable lacking a clear vowel, and the continuant voicing provided by the /z/ at the end (spelled “s”). Also I can aurally picture somebody for whom this would be a normal (rapid connected informal speech) way of saying the word.
Thanks for so specifically articulating your objections!
Hehe…”vegetable”…
I remembered a syndicated segment from my local news decades back starring Joe Carcione The Green Grocer who murdered that word:
“Twins” is the [plural] subject.
Yes. As are “people” or “grapes.” My point is that “group of people” is parallel to “bunch of grapes,” and the method of perambulation doesn’t change that.
I was being facetious when mention perambulation (not a word easy to slide into one’s conversation); I realize full well that the method thereof changes nothing; only the subject agreeing with the verb was under discussion.
If the perambulation was facetious, then were you serious when you said “Not at all different”? Do you say “A group of people walks into a room”? If they’re not at all different, then you should use the same verb form for each.
My point is that if grapes are sentient, a “bunch of [sentient] grapes” maintain their individual identities in the same way as “group of people,” so the plural form is equally appropriate for both. (I’m assuming you use the plural form for “a group of people”; maybe you don’t, but “A group of people walks into a room” sounds pretty weird to me.”)
“Do you say “A group of people walks into a room”?”
Well, color me weird, then, ’cause I would.
“(I’m assuming you use the plural form for “a group of people” ”
group is singular, no matter of what or how many of whatever are in that group
In American English, the verb agrees with “bunch.” In British English, the verb agrees with “grapes.” Which isn’t to say everybody adheres to this in everyday speech, but them’s the rules.
CIDU Bill: it’s actually a bit more nuanced. See https://data.grammarbook.com/blog/numbers/the-number-vs-a-number/ — “the group” vs. “a group” matters.
Huh! Do other Americans in this thread say “A group of people walk into a room” or “…walks into a room”? The latter sounds very strange to my ear.
According to this site whether you use singular or plural for “group” depends on whether you’re thinking of the group as acting as a unit or not (this is why I initially thought the existence of the stem could be relevant, before deciding it wasn’t decisive enough). But I don’t think I would ever think of a group of (human) people walking as a collective unit enough to treat them as singular. (I’m not attempting to prescribe anyone else’s usage of “group,” just trying to think through why I conjugate the verb the way that do.)
Yes, I’m a General North American, and like you use a singular noun with “group” almost regardless of the semantics.
However, I do like saying “The committee are alarmed at that news!”.
BTW, someone along the way said they have “Mid-Atlantic” speech, and I took that to mean from the East Coast of the U.S., middle latitude so neither Southern nor Northeast. *However* there is a trend to use that term for bland or compromise of NY and UK speech — as though located notionally halfway across the ocean!
*blend
Though it could well end up bland.
“Yes, I’m a General North American, and like you use a singular noun with “group” almost regardless of the semantics.”
Are you “like [me]”? I would say “A group of people walk into a room,” meaning that I use the plural form “walk.” It seems like you’re saying you’re saying you would use the singular form?
Also, I’m not a general. [rim shot]
Hmm, now I’m losing my intuitions on this. :-(
” whether you use singular or plural for “group” depends on whether you’re thinking of the group as acting as a unit or not”
So, a group of people walk into a room, but a group of mind-controlled zombies walks into a room (presumably in lockstep)?
And so my tongue-in-cheek comment gets picked apart over one letter…
:-(
I used Mid Atlantic for the English dialect, because I was taught back when (late 80s) that there are generally three USA dialects, Southern/Western, Mid Atlantic, and New England. I can’t swear to the naming of any but the middle one, since that is my dialect. I also learned that Delaware is unique in that, small as it is, it contains all three groups. I also know that the British have the term Mid Atlantic to mean something between American and British. And I was aware of this as I used the term in my post, but didn’t feel like doing the research to see what the current terms are, and was hoping no one would call me on it or be confused by it.
Oh well ;-)
Shrug: This is an example I found of treating “group” as singular:
“A small group of conservatives has decided to introduce a bill to cut taxes.”
So I guess they’re implying that conservatives are mind-controlled lockstep zombies?
Do you say . . .
A flock of birds flies overhead.
. . . or . . .
A flock of birds fly overhead.
The pair of pants are blue.
…. kidding
also:
> https://data.grammarbook.com/blog/numbers/the-number-vs-a-number/
that is wrong.
The number of people we need to hire is thirteen. A number of people we need to hire is six. Another number of people we need to hire is seven.
The distinction they’ve mischaracterized is whether you’re talking about a number, which is singular, or a group of something, which is then plural. They have gotten the wrong idea because the group construct is an idiom and it only accepts “a”.
Andréa: They both sound OK to me, but I would tend to say “fly.”
@ Andréa – As Bill mentioned above, the choice of a singular or plural verb for group terms varies between American and British usage. I occasionally run into this in sport results, in which British reporters will say things like “Manchester play against Arsenal“, instead of the usual American expression “Washington plays against New York“.
I’m very cognizant of that difference; in fact, I just read something this a.m. that was British and used the singular noun with the plural verb.
Reading an old book of “Mutts” comics last night with my son, he tripped over the word “schedule”, so after I told him that it was pronounced “skedjule”, I warned him that when he runs into it in English class, his teacher will probably say that it’s “shed-yool”.
Here’s a passage using “peak” for “past the peak, into decline” . As I was asking about somewhere around here :-)
From The Atlantic newsletter. The point of the article was about “impossible burger” appearing on menus.
“Peak meat” won’t happen because tens of millions of carnivores suddenly got religion on animal rights, but rather because they were motivated by the opposite of a collective sacrifice: the magic of a longer menu.
That usage comes specifically from “peak oil”. FWIW.