Potato, Pototo(e)

I’ve been thinking about how people hear sounds. I’ve been thinking about it for a while because if you have a class that hears sounds, discrepancies especially, you need to teach them differently than you teach a class that does not. I say status with a long A, (like state) for instance. It isn’t more correct than status with a short a (like game stats), but I like it better. So, for fear that some will think, as I pronounce it differently in answering a question than they did in asking it and that I am “correcting” their pronunciation, I tell my classes that both are correct and that I have chosen this one. I now know that for a lot of my classes, probably most of them, that distinction is a waste of time. They don’t hear the difference.

Then this morning on the way to Starbucks, Bette was reading me a piece from The Oregonian about people who are fluent in more than one language. They have better “executive function,” the article said, meaning that they are able to disattend from one language to focus entirely (at the moment) on the other one. They found a five year delay in the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, too, for multilingual oldsters. Warum ist das?

Then, this afternoon, on the way home from the office, I heard a broadcast of Radio Lab, featuring Walter Mischel. Oh good, I said, now I will still the lingering doubt about how to pronounce his name. I remember mis-SHELL from my grad school days, but all the people narrating the show and talking to him were saying MISH-ell. Well, I said to myself, it’s been a long time since grad school. I guess I got it wrong. Then in the signoff—one of the really cute things about Radio Lab is that they get all their guests to record the signoff for them—part of the script was read by the man himself and he said Mis-SHELL. He was the one person on the show who pronounced his name that way.

So I am imagining that something like this must have happened in developing the show. “So, we are thinking about doing a show on your famous marshmallow experiment, Dr. MISH-ell.” And the grad student who works with him every day says, “Oh good. Dr. Mis-SHELL will be pleased. The data on those four –year olds, now 45 year-olds—has just come in. So he passes the phone along and the man himself says, “This is Dr. Mis-SHELL.” The host or the scheduler says, “Ah, Dr. MISH-ell, what a pleasure to talk with you. I have been a fan of your marshmallow experiment for a long time.”

It must have been like that. No one hears it. You don’t hear conversations about Cuba and environs where one of the speakers says car-RIB-ean and the other ca-rib-BEE-un. At least, they don’t say it for very long. One of them says, “Um…it’s ‘car-RIB-ean.” Then follows a discussion about which authority says it one way and which the other; or one about whether the Carib people will be offended by having their name muffled by one pronunciation; or what kind of gall it takes to “correct” the person you are talking to and do you really want to have this conversation or not. I’ve heard all those.

What you don’t hear is the conversation going on with both pronunciations being used. The same for him-a-LAY-un mountains and him-ALL-yun mountains. The conversation doesn’t go on. It’s not, as in the old song, “You say po-TA-to and I say po-TAHT-to (e).”

The least generous part of me gets irritated that someone—that would be other person, he said to himself—is saying it wrong. -ly. A more recent and more generous layer says, when a lull arrives in the conversation, I noticed that you say X; I’ve mostly heard it pronounced Y. What even the most placid part of me seems unable to do is just hang with the conversation, allowing the two forms to coexist and for neither speaker, apparently to hear that there are two forms. After while it starts to feel like I’ve lost a filling and can’t keep my tongue out of the cavity and I just need to find a way to talk about something else.