Jump to content

Talk:English in New Mexico

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Talk:New Mexican English)


Results of a new source-discovery run

[edit]

I did a bunch of digging for sources, on:

  1. NM English, Spanish and their contact
  2. Sociology, sociolinguistics, education policy, and subculture of Latino English and bilingualism (mostly not constrainable to NM, but often to the SW)
  3. The Spanish of the area (again often of the SW in general, not just NM)
  4. Historical and cultural background material that may relate, e.g. as to Native American English usage in the area, development of Southern and Southwestern English, cultural events in NM and the SW that affected Hispanic versus Euro-American population and affluence, etc.

It's not comprehensive, being the cream of about 8 pages of Google Scholar results, and a bunch of looking around on Amazon, plus some follow-the-rabbit digging. But it's quite a lot of material that, even if not usable at this article, should be at related ones, including perhaps an article on "Southwestern American English" or "English in the American Southwest".

  • Notes
    • Most of these are behind paywalls. I may have missed some full-text download links among them, and I did not try alternative searches for individual papers to see if they're available in full text at other sites. This was a "fast" (8.5 hour) search-examine-cite dump (from combing the results of a Google Scholar search on Southwest American English).
    • Search results for Southwestern English generally produce results relating to southwestern England.
    • I formatted them as WP:CS1 citations for easy re-use.

The sources:

  • On dialectology in the region or in the US broadly:
  • Spanish–English contact, code switching, and creolization:
  • On the Spanish of the region (and its influence on the local English or vice versa):
  • Relationships of bilingualism, English fluency, and accented speech to education, medical care, etc., in the region:
  • Native American connections:
  • Connections between African American Vernacular English, a.k.a. Black English Vernacular, and general Southern dialects (which definitely includes Texan and Oklahoman but probably not New Mexican through Californian except to a minor extent, until the rise of hip hop subculture in the 1980s):
  • Historical and cross-cultural background:

 — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  12:47, 6 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

New Mexican English

[edit]

Pronunciations

[edit]

Kbb2: You're not providing any sources for your pronunciations that would override mine, so why don't we just agree to use phonemic transcriptions on this page? That would simplify our editing disagreements. (I also don't understand why you're opposed to narrow transcriptions for exact dialects but that's another matter.) Wolfdog (talk) 17:11, 12 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Wolfdog: Sorry, WP failed to ping me the last time (maybe you should use the ping template instead of the u(ser) one, it seems to be more reliable). This is the first time I'm seeing this.
The reason I don't like the transcriptions ˈmäːkinä] and [ˈɒmbɚːz] is because they're inconsistent, strange and probably not entirely correct. First of all, the length marks: the length of the stressed open central vowel in máquina is already conveyed by the stress mark, and we don't use the length mark in IPA transcriptions of NAE on Wikipedia. The length mark in ombers is almost certainly wrong, and so seems to be the initial vowel (are we really to believe that this dialect differentiates LOT from PALM)? This is why I reverted you: because you reinstated wrong transcriptions. When it comes to the centralization diacritic on ⟨a⟩, it's almost certainly not needed. As I've already said, General American /ɑ/ varies from back to central and so the symbol ⟨ɑ⟩ already covers the open central area in NAE dialectology (and English dialectology in general).
The idea of using the IPAc-en template is equally bad. Help:IPA/English is meant to be of help to laymen, but this can't be done at the cost of inaccurate or inconsistent transcriptions here or on any other dialect page. As we've already discussed, /ɪə, ʊə, ɛə/ do not exist in rhotic dialects. They're simply /i/, /u/ and /eɪ/ (or /e/ - same thing written differently) followed by /r/. Furthermore, using the IPAc-en template forces us to use the length mark, even though length isn't phonemic in any or almost any dialect of NAE. This can also create inconsistencies - transcriptions enclosed within IPAc-en use the length mark, and those that aren't don't. This is a perversion, if I may use that word - if anything, phonemic transcriptions should be the ones not to use the length mark, and it should be reserved for the narrowest kind of phonetic transcriptions.
Also, using IPAc-en template forces us to differentiate between /ɒ/ and /ɑː/, a difference that's alien to most varieties of NAE and almost certainly this one. It also forces us to differentiate between /iː/ and /uː/ on one hand and the unstressed-only /i/ and /u/ on the other (which aren't real phonemes by the way), which is a false distinction. What's worse - the usual North American transcription of these vowels is /i, u/ (like the unstressed vowels on Help:IPA/English), not /iː, uː/!
If you have suggestions on how to improve the current transcriptions in the article, I'm all ears. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 20:58, 16 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Kbb2: I'm a little confused as to what gives you the authority over me to determine what's inconsistent, strange and probably not entirely correct when neither of us is using any sources to back up our opinions. I've come to these pronunciations by listening to New Mexicans on YouTube; you don't even offer where your pronunciations come from. (This, for example, is where my length marks come from, with prosodic elements being a very unique part of New Mexican English, it seems.)
Contrary to your assumptions, it's not rare to find speakers who merge LOT-PALM-PALM using a rounded /ɑ/: in other words: [ɒ]. It certainly happens among some of the New Mexicans I've heard. In any case, the Wikipedia diaphoneme /ɒ/ still covers that; so not sure of what the big problem is there. And your idea of symbols "covering" certain larger phonetic areas/spaces does not preclude the fact that there can sometimes be a benefit in narrowly transcribing dialects, as I've argued elsewhere.
I happily defer to your rhotic-dialects argument (I admittedly barely understand some of the consensus-decided intricacies of the WP diaphonemic system, even though I'm prepared to defend its basic existence) and I even agree with your phonemic length-mark argument (although "perversion" is a tad dramatic, no? Haha).
Again, I don't entirely understand your minor crusade against using the IPAc-en template on an encyclopedia that is mostly meant for laymen, but we don't need to argue that here. More specifically (and also again), I've offered that we use a phonemic transcription or how about a broad American phonemic transcription, which, in my previous words, would simplify our editing disagreements by at least forcing us into a more universally agreeable format (rather than you and me wrangling over every phonetic detail); it's still not clear to me why you object to this better compromise. For example, why in the world are you insisting on [o] for the assumed New Mexican allophone of [oʊ], when you and I could be pretty content agreeing that the phoneme at play is /oʊ/ (that's what we've consistently used on Wikipedia) and thus just write it as such?? My suggestion: Let's just use a broad American system. Wolfdog (talk) 22:40, 16 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Aspiration in New Mexican English

[edit]

Nardog, In response to your revert to remove aspiration from the transcription, saying one of the key characteristics of Chicano English is shorter VOT as in Spanish; see e.g. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.550.1032&rep=rep1&type=pdf, p.69, I appreciate you presenting this source. Interesting. This indirectly contradicts a source I was just reading today, Carmen Fought's "Chicano English" in World Englishes Volume II (edited by Tometro Hopkins). Fought makes an effort to transcribe the dialect very narrowly, including on page 123 writing that together would often be pronounced [tʰugɛðəɹ]. Now that I look more into her work, you can see that she routinely shows aspiration for the normally-aspirated English consonants, like throughout her Chicano English in Context. To add another complication to your argument, it's likely that most Chicano English is actually a "mix" of stress-timed and syllable-timed. To add further complications to your argument, are we talking about Chicano English here? -- or is canales truly a loanword used among a majority of New Mexicans (even Anglo or non-Spanish-speaking ones)? The continuing crappiness of our sources on this page doesn't exactly help us to know. But we can pretty safely expect non-Latino and probably many Latino New Mexicans to aspirate these consonants. It'd be smarter to stick to showing aspiration. (If only there were fuller and more fleshed-out sources on New Mexican English and what exactly it is -- if anything! But I've been criticized in the past for continuing to harp on that.) Wolfdog (talk) 00:03, 29 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Fought is apparently going for a very narrow transcription (unreasonably so, if you ask me)—any prevocalic voiceless oral stop is technically aspirated, some more than others, because humans are not robots and it's impossible to start voicing exactly at the same time as the burst. Regardless, I wouldn't—and we shouldn't—transcribe the consonant in that position with aspiration even in GA. stress doesn't determine aspiration is simply false (at least in most major varieties of English), we recently discussed this at Talk:English phonology/Archive 4#Aspiration of English stops.
(If I remember correctly, I think I heard shorter VOT in Chicano English being talked about in this podcast episode, which is why I was like, "No way!", when I saw your edit and summary. I think you'd find that show informative and entertaining for what it's worth.) Nardog (talk) 00:27, 29 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I would definitely be interested in the podcast, thank you! As for your "Aspiration of English stops" discussion, tell me if I'm misreading this, but aren't other users arguing, like me, that aspiration indeed occurs at the beginning of a word AKA word-initially (as in canales) which is different than at the beginning of any old syllable (as in, arguably, upper)? Wolfdog (talk) 08:36, 29 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It's just a matter of degree. The VOT before unstressed vowels is indeed longer when word-initial than when word-internal, but it's still shorter than the VOT before stressed vowels. So whether to mark it in a transcription is an arbitrary choice and comes down to considerations like whether the aspiration is significant enough and whether it is pertinent to the context. I don't think we should particularly in this case because speakers with Spanish/syllable-timed influence are likely to render it more like [ka], with a full-vowel quality but with little aspiration, and speakers with GA/stress-timed influence are likely to render it more like [kə], with the vowel reduced, which means little aspiration anyway. The vowel reduction is even more likely to occur when preceded by a word like a preposition.
(Wait, Fought is the guest of that episode! But it seems I wasn't remembering correctly—it was probably some other episode where one of the hosts was talking about shorter VOT. It's a really good episode anyway though; I also recommend the one about language policy in Canada and the one about transgender and non-binary people.) Nardog (talk) 19:03, 29 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Haha! That's funny about Fought. OK, well when I hear an entirely unaspirated /k/, /p/, or /t/ at the beginning of a word, that tends to sound more foreign to me, whereas even an over-aspirated initial /k/, /p/, or /t/ feels unremarkably like English. (I remember I had a native English-speaking friend who would pronounce a word like connnect even as strongly as [kxəˈnɛkt] and most of her other friends didn't notice.) Yeah, I get that it's all a matter of degrees though. Wow, this sounds like a really cool podcast! Wolfdog (talk) 14:35, 31 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yikes at calling one of the theorized dialects a form of Chicano English

[edit]

None of these sources corroborate more than a singular dialect of New Mexican English. And by the way, it is massively racist to call Hispano community solely Chicano, especially considering the non-Aztecan indigenous element of that particular group. There is no evidence that the Hispanic community speaks a completely different variety of English. Also, the pageviews for this article didn’t surpass the “New Mexican English” terminology until very recently, meaning that it was and is the preferred term. Looking through the page history, this article has been morphed in a bad way due to POV, by blocking any and all sources that are contrary to select few editors. 2601:8C2:8080:1BC0:286F:3FE:8B00:F772 (talk) 22:11, 18 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Here is a source that New Mexican English has regularly been a more popular term for views on this page. https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2015-07-01&end=2020-03-31&pages=New_Mexican_English%7CEnglish_in_New_Mexico 2601:8C2:8080:1BC0:B823:27F5:21FA:8BB3 (talk) 03:30, 2 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
A redirect's popularity on Wikipedia still has nothing to do with it. We go by commonality among reliable, independent sources. If you've been "looking through the page history", you've noticed that there is only one editor who's been pushing for this change, he has been blocked for sock puppetry and playing stupid games, and the few sources he has proposed for this particular argument have been very weak. If you have a non-WP:CIRC source for this, propose it. Grayfell (talk) 04:00, 2 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]