En plus de retracer le nom du premier porteur suivi de celui de ses parents, de son lieu d’origine, du nom de son epouse ainsi que de ceux de ses parents, et du lieu et de la date de leur mariage, le dictionnaire nous apprend que l’origine du patronyme peut provenir d’un toponyme, d’un nom de metier, d’un trait physique ou caracteriel d’un sobriquet ironique, d’un surnom de soldat, d’un lien de parente, d’un ancien prenom, d’un nom germanique ou d’un nom etranger altere, soit de France, ou d’ailleurs...

One of the major tenets of the Speech Learning Model (SLM) is that “if two L2 sounds differ in perceived dissimilarity from the closest sound in the L1 inventory, the more dissimilar of the L2 sounds will manifest the greater amount of learning” (Aoyama et al. 2004:248). Given that certain studies have provided “evidence of greater learning for [®] than [l] by N[ative]J[apanese] learners of English” (2004:246), the SLM hypothesis can only be upheld if English [l] is more similar to Japanese [R] than English [®] is. However, this is clearly counterintuitive since, by most accounts, [R] represents a central flap, [l] a lateral approximant, and [®] a central approximant. In this study, it will be argued that English laterals cannot be more similar to Japanese /r/ than English rhotics are, as the SLM would have it, unless the Japanese sound contains a lateral component such as that which is found in the flap [‰]. As it happens, a number of phoneticians and phonologists have argued that this is indeed the case with Japanese /r/, as will be shown, and this is something that the proponents of the SLM would need to acknowledge if their theoretical stance is to be maintained.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, migrants from the Channel Islands settled in various parts of North America. Many of them bore French names which their ancestors had brought over from Normandy and Brittany to Jersey and Guernsey in previous centuries. However, since many of these surnames were no longer found to exist in France or had evolved beyond recognition, their etymologies became irretrievable in standard French onomastic works. In this study, it will be shown that their origins can be ascertained for the most part by supplementing traditional research methods with the vast onomastic, geographical and genealogical data that has become available on the internet in recent years.

Most surnames of French origin in North America were borne by migrants from various parts of France, so it is hardly surprising that the two sets should share many commonalities. One of these involves the existence of hagionymic family names, for example, Saint-Pierre, Saint-Jean, Sainte-Marie, and the like. A significant difference between them, however, is that the ones in present-day France invariably stem from surnames that were taken directly from hagiotoponyms, of which there were a great many, whereas the majority of those in North America originate from nicknames - the so-called dit names - of various types. Prominent among these were the numerous noms de guerre that discharged soldiers passed on to their descendants.

L’avancement de l’économie sociale en lien avec le monde syndical. Un article de la revue Économie et Solidarités (Le développement des territoires dans un contexte de restructuration de l’État) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Many French-Canadian family names were altered when their bearers emigrated to various English-speaking areas of North America. As in the case of all the other foreign names that were anglicized for various social and linguistic reasons, different types of adaptive mechanisms were at work. The most common were purely orthographical in nature, ranging from the simple elimination of diacritics to the replacement of unfamiliar vowel and consonant sounds. Other surname modifications went beyond spelling changes and were dependent upon some notion of structural or semantic equivalence. Some were based solely on the fact that a French name sounded vaguely similar to an existing English surname while other non-orthographical substitutions involved translation. The object of this study will be to examine how this process affected French-Canadian surnames wherein this adaptive mechanism was particularly prevalent and diverse.

The purpose of this study is to compare the data on the Americanization of European family names presented in Hanks (2003) with the information that can currently be garnered from the plethora of genealogical websites that have sprung up in the recent past. The results show (1) that many of the origins he proposes fail to conform to the evidence found on those websites, and (2) that most of the surnames which he qualifies as "puzzling" or "unexplained" can be readily accounted for on the basis of this same type of evidence.

On a tenté de démontrer récemment que les occlusives épenthétiques s’assimilent à la fois au voisement et au lieu d’articulation de la consonne précédente. Il existe plusieurs exceptions à cette généralisation cependant. Une nouvelle analyse du phénomène nous permet non seulement de formuler une règle générale d’épenthèse consonantique qui ne donne lieu à aucune exception que l’on doit ensuite tenter d’expliquer par des règles propres aux langues individuelles, mais nous permet aussi d’établir un ensemble de conditions et de contraintes universelles qui sont de façon générale subordonnées à la structure syllabique.

On a l’habitude de reconnaître l’existence de deux types majeurs de développement phonologique : le changement phonétique régulier, et le changement analogique. Selon Mańczak, cependant, il y en aurait un troisième : le changement phonétique irrégulier causé par la fréquence. Cet article analyse le domaine du changement sporadique à la lumière de phénomènes propres au québécois afin de déterminer si on peut y trouver une confirmation des généralisations qui ont été formulées au sujet de la fréquence d’emploi et de ses conséquences.

À première vue, les règles qui régissent l’effacement du cheva en québécois, tout particulièrement dans les monosyllabes, paraissent très complexes du fait qu’il existe tellement de situations diverses et variables dont on doit chercher à rendre compte. Cependant, si on établit au préalable toutes les contraintes phonotactiques sur le nombre et le type de consonnes qui peuvent se succéder — une sorte de pendant à la soi-disant loi des trois consonnes du français — on arrive à expliquer tout le processus de la chute du cheva d’une façon beaucoup plus simple, claire et économique.

Les clitiques et les affixes, comme on l’a souvent observé, proviennent d’anciens morphèmes lexicaux. En français, une particule interrogative s’est développée d’une façon tout à fait inusitée, c’est-à-dire à partir de la fusion de la consonne finale d’un verbe avec le pronom de la troisième personne du singulier, et cet élément s’est propagé graduellement aux autres personnes sous l’effet de divers processus phonologiques, syntaxiques et analogiques. Bien que ce ti soit devenu obsolète en français hexagonal, son substitut tu est toujours très vivant en français canadien, la construction sujet + verbe + tu s’avérant la façon la plus usuelle de formuler des interrogations fermées dans ce dialecte. En dépit de tout ce qu’on sait sur l’histoire de ce morphème, cependant, on n’en est pas encore arrivé à en déterminer le statut grammatical précis. Or les critères que l’on a proposés depuis quelques années pour distinguer entre les clitiques et les affixes semblent indiquer que ce morphème est effectivement un suffixe.

Abstract This study shows how the surnames of German immigrants to French Canada, most of whom were Hessian soldiers who stayed in Quebec after the American Revolutionary War, were altered over the course of time so as to become unique in the French-speaking world.

The minimality of phonological change is a tried-and-true principle that is meant to ensure that any proposed regular sound change will obey the all-important and fundamental criterion of naturalness by severely constraining the types of modifications that segments can undergo. It has shown itself to be an indispensable aid in setting up the most plausible and realistic reconstructions and relative chronologies by establishing clearcut demarcations between observed sound correspondences and actual sound changes. However, the validity and usefulness of this principle has recently been called into question by Scheer (2004) who argues that its application can lead to scenarios in which an inordinate number of steps can be proposed to link one historical segmental stage to another, or where no evidence, dialectal or otherwise, can be adduced to set up some intermediate stage that the principle of minimality would require to exist between two diachronically corresponding sounds. To this end, he adduces data involving (1) the velarization of dental stops in Cologne German, (2) the assibilation and fronting of velar stops in French, and (3) the Second German Consonant Shift. In this paper, I will review the cases described by Scheer in order to show that they do not contravene or invalidate the principle of minimality in any way.

Although ESL pronunciation instruction has traditionally focused almost exclusively on phonemes, there have always been those who advocated devoting some attention to allophones. However, given the limited time and resources foreign-language teachers usually have to devote to pronunciation , they may have to be very selective in the subphonemic segments they introduce in the classroom. But on what basis can one choose which allophones to teach? In this study, I will attempt to show that there are two basic criteria which can serve to distinguish which of these may merit more consideration: transferability i.e., potential pronounceability, and differential salience, i.e., the phonetic distance between a particular allophone and its corresponding phoneme. On this basis, it will be argued that if one is to consider teaching the pronunciation of any subphonemic segments in North American English (NAE), the highest priority should be given to flaps, especially those that are allophones of /t/.

Reviewed by: A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics by David Crystal Marc Picard A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. 5th edn. By David Crystal. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Pp. xxv, 508. ISBN 0631226648. $29.95. Every five or six years since 1980, the world of linguistics has come to expect a new edition of this volume. This latest incarnation, which is double the size of the original version, now includes more than 5,000 terms which are incorporated into over 3,000 entries. What has not changed, according to the author, is that like the four previous editions, the book is aimed at the same groups of potential users, namely ‘the range of teaching and remedial language professions, such as foreign-language teaching or speech and language therapy; and the range of academic fields which study language as part of their concerns, such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, literary criticism and philosophy’; and, of course, ‘an increasing number of students of linguistics’ (vii). This latest edition has a brand new look, inside and out. The size of the book has been increased by almost two cm., and the presentation has been modified in various ways. A significant improvement in this area is the drastic toning down of the rather distracting heavy boldface type which Crystal has always made such liberal use of both in the head-words, which are often expressions or phrases, and elsewhere in the entries. Another is the wise decision to have ‘dropped the convention (which some readers found confusing) of including inflectional variants immediately after the headword; these are now included in bold within an entry, on their first mention’ (x). For example, a fourth edition headword like ‘glottal(-ic, -ize, -ization, glottis)’ is now simply glottal (adj.) with the derivatives glottis, glottal stop, glottalization, glottalic, glottalized, and glottal constrictions appearing at various points in the entry. The impression of clutter that the previous editions often projected has been all but eliminated as a result of these changes. In terms of content, everything preceding the dictionary entries is new. Thus, the four short prefaces which appeared in the preceding edition, that is, the ones from 1980, 1985, 1991, and 1997, have been replaced by a lengthier ‘Preface to the fifth edition’. In addition, a nine-page ‘List of abbreviations’ and a three-page ‘List of symbols’ have been added, and the latest IPA chart (revised to 1993) now appears instead of the previous (1989) version. Changes in the entries themselves are basically of two kinds: Some are totally new, for example, bandwidth, faithfulness (FAITH), antiformant, factorial typology, endangered language, to name just a few, while others have been extended to various degrees, for example, optimality theory, which is now more than double its original length. There is little doubt that this is the most up-to-date, complete, and reasonably priced linguistics dictionary on the market at the present time. In comparison, Hadumod Bussmann’s Routledge dictionary of language and linguistics (London: Routledge, 1996) and its 1999 (unrevised) paperback version are much more expensive and obviously not as current, nor do they have as many entries. As for R. L. Trask’s excellent A dictionary of grammatical terms in linguistics (London: Routledge, 1993) and A dictionary of phonetics and phonology (London: Routledge, 1996), not only are they obviously in need of revision, but together they include some 1,500 fewer terms while costing almost twice as much. In sum, with the advent of this latest edition, C’s A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics can rightly be called an institution, and one that promises to be around for years to come. Marc Picard Concordia University Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America

Reviewed by: The Oxford dictionary of pronunciation for current English by Clive Upton, William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., Rafal Konopka Marc Picard The Oxford dictionary of pronunciation for current English. By Clive Upton, William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., and Rafal Konopka. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xx, 1208. ISBN 0198631561. $45.95 (Hb). The ‘current English’ transcribed in this dictionary is that of British English (BR) and United States American English (AM) which, for the most part, would also include Canadian English (CA). The authors have intended it, first, for native or fluent speakers of English for whom it should serve as ‘a guide to the pronunciation of those uncommon words with which they may be unfamiliar and whose pronunciation may not immediately be apparent’ (viii), and second, for learners of English for whom it should provide ‘a comprehensive guide to the pronunciation of the core vocabulary of the two principal international varieties’ (viii). The design and organization of this dictionary are as pellucid and straightforward as can be. Entries basically consist of a headword in bold type followed on successive lines by an IPA transcription in both dialects, for example: afloat BR ə'flə℧t AM ə'flo℧t Clarity comes at the expense of economy, however, since this model is followed even when the two transcriptions are identical. More complex entries include: (1) variant pronunciations which are separated by commas, as in /kɑːst, kast/ for BR cast or /kɔt, kɑt/ for AM caught; (2) forms with optional elements which are enclosed in parentheses, for example, AM /'wɪn(t)ər/ winter, BR/'deɪndʒə(r)/ danger; and (3) headwords accompanied by inflectional forms which are either preceded simply by a hyphen, for example, /deɪl, -z/ for dale, dales, or by a vertical bar where they are to be attached to the headword, for example, BR /'iːtər | 'i, -ɪz/ for eater, eatery, eateries. As for the pronunciation models selected for what has been labeled BR and AM, the authors have eschewed, in the case of the former, the kind of Received Pronunciation (RP) that ‘has long been the norm in British English pronouncing and general dictionaries and in language-teaching classrooms’, one that is now, in their view, ‘the possession of a small minority restricted in terms of age, class, and region’; instead, they have opted for ‘a younger, unmarked RP . . . which is not regionally centered or redolent of class’ (xi). The major points of departure from traditional RP transcription practice are the use of [a] for [æ](had, hand), [ε] for [e] (red, bread), [Λɪ] for [aɪ] (fight, lie), [εː] for [εə](bear, fair), final [i] for [ɪ](lucky, money), and [a] as a variant of [ɑː] (brass, staff) which is characteristic of northern RP speakers. For AM, ‘[t]he pronunciation model adopted here follows the trend among younger educated speakers of exclusion of regional features’, and this makes it, according to the authors, ‘quite similar to what one hears in the national broadcast media, since broadcasters have long participated in the more general trend of younger educated speakers’ (xiv). A few curious and, some may think, rather infelicitous decisions have been made in the transcription of this variety, however. One is the absence of the generally noted length diacritic on the vowels [iː], [uː], [ɔː], [ɑː], so that we find, for example, that heed is BR /hiːd/ and AM /hid/, something that clearly does not reflect the sort of ‘broadly phonetic’ transcription proclaimed by the authors. Neither does the use of [ə] to represent both [ə] and [Λ], which yields many anomalous notations like BR /sΛn/ and AM /sən/ for sun. The most unfortunate choice of all, however, is surely that of using [d] to indicate [ɾ], the flapped allophone of [t]. Given that flapping also applies to [d] and [n], not only have they misrepresented this phonological process but they have also given the false impression that forms like ladder ['lædər] and Adam ['ædəm] have undergone no change while their homophones latter ['lædər] and atom [ædəm] have. Since no other allophones are noted, the wisest course of action would probably have been to simply list the environments for the rule in the ‘Introduction’. In sum, although this...

It has recently been argued by Gess (2001) that the long vowels resulting from the compensatory lengthening that emerged in the wake of preconsonantal /s/-deletion in Old French had all been shortened by the sixteenth century. Given that many of these long vowels are still present in Canadian French, this conclusion cannot possibly be correct. What will be shown here is precisely how Gess' methodology led him to obtain such counterfactual results.

Reviewed by: Language change: The interplay of internal, external and extra-linguistic factors ed. by Mari C. Jones, Edith Esch Marc Picard Language change: The interplay of internal, external and extra-linguistic factors. Ed. by Mari C. Jones and Edith Esch. (Contributions to the sociology of language 86.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002. Pp. ix, 338. ISBN 311017202X. $105.60 (Hb). In the ‘Introduction’ by Kimberly Farrar and Mari C. Jones, we are told that ‘[t]he main aim of [End Page 178] this volume is to provide evidence from a number of different languages and language families to counter the apparent tendency that has existed in the past to see the explanation of language change as a choice between “language-internal” (i.e. intra-systemic) and “language-external” factors (i.e. contact)’ (1). This collection comprises fourteen articles, grouped under four major themes, with each article conveniently preceded by an abstract. The first theme is ‘Levelling’, a concept which has been extended from its ‘internal’ sense of complete or partial elimination of alternations within a paradigm to an ‘external’ sense of reduction of attrition of marked variants whereby two dialects of a language may become more alike in the direction of the more prestigious variety, or the salient differences between two dialects of equal status may be reduced in the direction of a lowest common denominator. The articles in this section are ‘Dialect contact and koinéization: The case of northern France’ by David Hornsby, ‘The depicardization of the vernaculars of the Lille conurbation’ by Tim Pooley, ‘Jordanian and Palestinian dialects in contact: Vowel raising in Amman’ by Enam Al-Wer, ‘ “Salience” as an explanatory factor in language change: Evidence from dialect levelling in urban England’ by Paul Kerswill and Ann Williams, and ‘My Dad’s auxiliaries’ by Edith Esch. The next theme is ‘Convergence’, which involves a bidirectional linguistic influence that ‘may be perceived as a more insidious form of contact-induced change as the lexicons of the converging varieties are left mainly intact, while the change occurs primarily at the morpho-syntactic level’ (10–11). This section contains Mari C. Jones’s ‘Mette a haout dauve la grippe des Angllaïs: Convergence on the Island of Guernsey’, David Holton’s ‘Modern Greek: Towards a standard language or a new diglossia?’, Laura Wright’s ‘Standard English and the lexicon: Why so many different spellings?’, Joseph Cremona’s ‘Latin and Arabic evolutionary processes: Some reflections’, and David Britain and Andrea Sudbury’s ‘There’s sheep and there’s penguins: Convergence, “drift” and “slant” in New Zealand and Falkland Island English’. What the editors have termed ‘adaptive mechanisms’ constitutes the subject of the third section. At issue here is primary bilingual language acquisition wherein individual children can be viewed as being in a contact situation in the sense that one language exerts an ‘external’ influence on the other. The two articles that deal with this topic are ‘Convergence in the brain: The leakiness of bilinguals’ sound systems’ by Ian Watson and ‘Language contact in early bilinguals: The special status of function words’ by Margaret Deuchar and Marilyn May Vihman. The last section revolves around the notion of code-copying, which presents itself as an interactive approach to the description of contact-induced language change, one that deals with concepts such as leveling, convergence, and adaptive mechanisms in an integrative way. Dealing with this topic are Lars Johanson’s ‘Contact-induced change in a code-copying framework’ and Éva Ágnes Csatô’s ‘Karaim: A high-copying language’. What is most impressive about this collection of articles is the range of perspectives it offers, not only in terms of the number of languages and dialects that are treated but also with regard to the multi-faceted approaches under which language change, variation, and development are studied and analyzed. From phonetics to pragmatics and even orthography, there is hardly an area of linguistic science that is not touched on, and Jones and Esch are to be...

It has often been observed that languages are generally quite intolerant of hiatus. For example, Kenstowicz notes that "vowel sequences (V+V) are phonologically unstable" (1994: 23) while Trask contends that "particularly unstable are vowels in hiatus . . . Such sequences are apparently uncomfortable, and languages employ a variety of strategies for eliminating the hiatus" (1996: 65). Thus, when vowels come to meet at word and morpheme boundaries, that is, when V#V and V+V sequences are created, there is a marked predisposition for Speakers to modify them in different ways so äs to smooth out the articulatory transition, äs it were. This type of concatenative hiatus has been well studied, notably by Casali (1996, 1997) who provided a list of the various sound changes involved, äs we will see in the first section of this paper. Another way in which hiatuses arise is through intervocalic consonant deletion but, äs far äs can be determined, no systematic analysis of the exact conditions under which the resulting V$V sequences can crop up has ever been undertaken. This will constitute the main purpose of this study, and through this investigation it will be shown that no matter how unstable a phonological string may emerge from a sound change, there exists no evident constraint or resistance against the implementation of such a phonological process.