"Thees is love" and short 'i' lengthening

This is such a micro music linguistic trend that I have a hard time justifying writing about it, but I've now heard it from several different artists and feel compelled to include it here.

It's simple: take a word with a short i [I] sound, like 'bit'. Now replace that vowel with a long 'ee' sound [i], so it sounds like 'beat'. You don't have to go all the way to the [i] sound - you can be somewhere in between - but the end result sounds more like the long 'ee' than the short 'ih'.

The scant handful of examples:

• Florence and the Machine. What kind of man loves like th[i]s?
• Adele. Chasing Tables. "Th[i]s is love."
• Natalia Kills. Television. "We'll never go to heaven but who needs to when you l[i]ve this good."

I had originally included these in my article on Indie Voice, but after some feedback, I decided to remove them since my examples leaned more towards pop and pop-indie, and I couldn't really say I'd heard them enough to justify calling it part of the Indie Voice cluster. But if it's not indie voice, what is it?

I have so few examples that coming up with any serious explanation isn't likely, but we can speculate. My immediate thought is that lengthening and raising the vowel in 'BIT' is something that many speakers of foreign languages do, because they don't have a short 'ih' vowel and the closest available one to them is 'ee'. It's common for Spanish speakers to confuse 'ship' and 'sheep'.

Singers can be influenced by singers with other accents, including singers who speak English as a second language. Marina Diamandis is one such example who sounds like she's imitating Greek or Spanish speakers. I also hypothesized that influence from jazz and bossa nova was part of the Indie Voice sound. If you want to use the fancy terms, these pronunciations are "linguistic resources" that singers can draw from when singing. Imagine listening to someone who speaks differently from you, hearing a pronunciation you find cool, and going "I'm gonna save that for later..." and putting it in a sort of phonetic palette. (hat tip to Lisa Jansen for introducing me to the "linguistic resource" concept in her book on pop and rock pronunciation.)

Now, here's the thing that's bugging me... the ship-sheep confusion isn't considered cool by most people. It's one of the most obvious signs that you have a foreign accent, and it's one of the thing second-language speakers of English focus on when trying to reduce their accent. On the flipside, it's one of the features that comedians like to exaggerate when mimicking a foreign accent. A quick example comes from the song "Illegal Alien" by Genesis, where Phil Collins attempts to imitate a Mexican accent:

• "With a bottle of Tequila, and a new pack of c[i]garettes." - Illegal Alien, Genesis

One day, I'll do a little mini-dissection on "Illegal Alien," because wow does this song have some interesting ideas on what Spanish English sound like that. But I hope this gets the point across that this feature is ripe for mimicry and caricature.

Listening to Florence and Adele and Natalia, I don't really think they sound or want to sound foreign. In the words with the 'ih'-lengthening, the actual musical duration is also longer than the surrounding word. "What kind of man loves like thiiiiis?" "Thiiiiiis is love." "We'll never go to heaven but who needs to when you liiiive this good." Could it be easier to sing it by raising the vowel? This would be in contrast to the pop pronunciations of HAPPY with a short 'ih' at the end and HAPPY with an 'ey' sound at the end - singers claim that 'ih' and 'ey', which are lower in the mouth, are easier to sing than the 'ee' they replace.

Could be a slip of the tongue, but Florence repeats this pronunciation in every instance of her chorus, so that's a whole lot of slips of the tongue that made it to the final cut.

If imitation is out, and there's no clear phonetic or musical motivation, then we're left with the fuzziest reason of all - aesthetics. Is there some kind of aesthetic linked to pronouncing 'this' as 'thees' that has nothing to do with foreign speakers of English? The fact that these pronunciations only show up at certain parts of the song, instead of replacing every 'ih' throughout, suggests that they're sort of special. It could be a type of marking, bringing attention to these syllables by breaking our expectations of which vowel 'belongs' there.

This is still all speculation, but sometimes that's the fun stuff. Do you have any other examples like this, from other genres? What do you think is motivating this pronunciation?

Holerö! 90s German Translationese from Nintendo

I've been playing a most delightful little game recently, called "CrossCode." The game is set in a world where people have such advanced virtual reality technology that they can play a massive international game with total immersion. It's a love letter to MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Runescape, and the interactions they foster. One such interaction is international, with the game having characters from France and Germany that sprinkle non-English words in for flavor. One that caught my eye was such:

I was a bit confused at first because this word looks more Swedishy to me than German, but the character otherwise uses recognizably German phrases.

Looking it up shows that I'm not the only one to have this question.

Smikey
Lukas' german catchphrases
I'm around 3 hours in, and Lukas mentions what seems to be a german expression, "holerö". I looked up its meaning and I was very puzzled to see that the only notable thing I've found was a german Super Mario comic which included the word. It's kind of stupid but I've gotten very curious about what the word means. Any help?

Ernsteen [has CrossCode] Jun 18, 2019 @ 3:18pm
It's just a rather uncommon way of saying hello.
Iirc the devs said they included it as a nod to bad old Nintendo translations.

Google gives me this, where someone quotes a (now offline) interview of the translator C. Moyse. https://www.multimediaxis.de/archive/index.php/t-117725.html

Originally posted by C.Moyse:
Also "holerö" stammt von meinem Kollegen Marcus. Ich weiß allerdings auch nicht genau, wo er das herhatte. Vielleicht von Loriot oder Helge Schneider. Das fanden wir so dämlich, dass wir es auch immer verwendet haben. (So "holerö" comes from my colleague Marcus. I don't know exactly where he got it, though. Maybe from Loriot or Helge Schneider. We thought it was so stupid that we always used it.)

So apparently it was just a silly in-joke, that he added into a few games' German translations.

GFluegel [Moderator] Jun 22, 2019 @ 6:04am
Yep, it's a reference to old German Nintendo translations and silly comics that appeared in German Nintendo magazine in the 90s. :>

The German magazine in question seems to be 'Sag niemals Holerö' meaning 'never say holerö.' In the magazine, 'holerö' turns characters into blocks of cheese. You can see an example below, with an explanation from the Bomberman Wiki that Holerö is an 'informal greeting' and a running joke in the German Nintendo magazine:

C. Moyse seems fondly remembered by a certain generation of German gamers, who recognize the use of this word from Secret of Mana and Evermore.

Posted by u/Saikonte
8 months ago
To whomever did the German translation..

Thank you! It's so good to read things like "holerö" from Schneider or geek-speak and little things that I myself encountered, when I first startet playing mmos.

The Holerö quote reminded me of Cloud M. Moyse who translated lots of games for the snes (Secret of Mana, Secret of Evermore) and I couldn't stop smiling for the 3 hours I'm in the game.

Thank you!

There is also an example in the 1996 game Donkey Kong Country 3, where a world is named 'Höhlen-Holerö'.

So far, we've been tapping around the question of what holerö actually means. And truth be told, I am not sure. One user claimed it was an 'uncommon way of saying hello,' and that is how it is used in the game. But actual references to this word are rather rare.

The word seems recognizable in translations of English to German, as one user on the forum Reset Era complains about its appearance:

Hektor: I wish we had movie dubs with regional dialects like Asterix Mundart

"Surtur, sapperlot! Dich gibbet ja immanoch!"

Alice: And then I'd wanna Rick James anyone who adds Holerö.

Looking it up on Instagram, for example, there are examples of food...

...and not food.

Some kind of berry, perhaps? (See UPDATE below.) This quote from an 1877 book would seem to suggest so:

"aus Tannzapfen gebrannt wurde , sowie das „ Holeröl " aus den Beeren des schwarzen Hollunders . Man versekte es mit Zucker und Wasser . Es hilft gegen das Uebertrinken und ist überhaupt „ a guits Zuig . Noch einmal gebrannt , wird"
("was distilled from pine cones, as well as the" Holeröl "from the berries of the black elderberry. Add sugar and water to it. It helps against drowning and is generally "a good Zuig." Burned again, " )

I haven't yet found any citations for this word being used as any sort of greeting outside of Nintendo-related sources, so this is a curious translation mystery! Could it be some kind of regionalism?

If you'd like to hear it pronounced, Bartleby from Germany has got you covered.

UPDATE

David Marjanović, a German speaker, has offered two corrections:

• "End-stressed nonsense syllable strings like this are common in yodeling." Usage is probably extrapolated from that. It is not an 'uncommon way of saying hello'!
• 'holeröl' is elderflower oil with no relation to 'holerö'. False positive.

I think this is the fastest an unsolved linguistic mystery on here has ever been solved. :)

"It's Covid Outside" - Mysterious Syntax of Weather Covid

I wanted to post about a novel construction I've noticed throughout all of last year, which is 'it's covid.' Perhaps you've seen it too? 'Covid' is behaving similarly to weather.

"I would have gone to the fabric store, but it's covid outside."

"We had to stop having parties because it's covid."

"It's the holiday time, but it's covid." "Because it's covid."

Look up "it's covid outside" on Twitter and you'll find a number of people using the expression unironically.

There have been people noting the weather-ness of COVID:

Moms in 2019: Don't forget your scarf it's cold outside.
Moms in 2020: Don't forget your mask, it's covid outside.
Source

We can easily replace all of these with weather words: "it's raining, it's sunny, it's snowing." Not all weather-related words are used in this way, though: "it's hailing" and "it's sleeting" do not sound natural, though they aren't ungrammatical.

"Covid" still doesn't take all the characteristics of a weather word, though. For one thing, although you can say "it's often sunny outside," you can't say *"it's often covid outside." It just sounds ungrammatical.

So "covid" is not behaving like an adjective, like "sunny." What about a verb? Let's compare "covid" constructions with other "Weather IT" constructions. Weather verbs behave specially with it.

• "It somestimes rains after snowing."
• *"It sometimes COVIDs after snowing."
• *"It sometimes rains after Covid/coviding."

Hmm, not that either. Much like how "covid" normally behaves, it seems like it's a noun. But if it's a noun, why can we say "it's covid outside"? We don't say *"it's volcano outside". "Covid" is taking on aspects of an adjective in being able to be modified by "outside." But it's not totally an adjective, because we can't say *"it's often covid outside."

I end with a question - what is going on with this construction? Are there similar ones out there (e.g. "It's orange fog outside")? A random search shows that there is a very rare form, "it's fire outside" for "there's a fire outside" (source).

Catch 'em, Ketchum

Reading about the Virginia Saltmarsh Mallow got me wondering how the word 'Mallow' is pronounced. My instinct is to say m[æ]llow, but what about marshm[ɛ]llow? Come to think of it, why is marshmallow pronounced with the DRESS [ɛ] vowel in American English? UK English seems to roundly prefer marshm[æ]llow, as to rhyme with 'hallow.' The predominant American form is, I think, marshmellow. But where did this pronunciation come from?

Another word with an 'a' spelling but an 'e' pronunciation is 'any.' Unlike 'marshmallow,' I can't actually think of any case of someone pronouncing 'any' like [æ]ni. 'Many' used to be pronounced with an [æ] sound, and a relic of this is the word 'manifold,' which comes from 'many' and has an [æ] sound. Under the influence of 'any,' it came to be pronounced as 'menny.' Why 'any' came to be pronounced with the [ɛ] in the first place is unclear, too.

Here is another one - a common pronunciation for 'catch' in American English is c[ɛ]tch. This one is common enough that it formed the basis of a pun name in a popular show. The Pokemon tagline in the 2000s was "Gotta Catch 'Em All." In that vein, the main character was named Ash Ketchum - as in Ash "Catch 'em."

I'm not sure how [æ] became raised in these cases. Any thoughts?

More than a WUH-man

So I was listening to one of those easy listening stations at the grocery store when I noticed something. They were playing "Margaritaville" by Jimmy Buffet, the chorus of which goes "some people say there's a woman to blame." I noticed that the singer didn't say the first syllable "woman" /wʊmən/ using the same vowel in book /bʊk/, but with a vowel that was closer to 'uh' in 'one' /wʌn/. If you'll look at a chart of where vowels are made in the mouth, you'll notice that /ʊ/ is high up and in the back. /ʌ/ is in the back, but it's much lower. It sounds like the singer of "Margaritaville" was therefore lowering the 'oo' vowel.

There are weird one-off pronunciations in many songs, but the thing is I swear I've heard it before. For one, I'm pretty sure this is an existing concept. I swear it's called "FOOT-lowering." If you're wondering why the word "FOOT" is there, it's because "FOOT" is a word that happens to have the vowel we're talking about (/ʊ/) and isn't easily confused for a different word. Googling FOOT-lowering doesn't get you anything about linguistics but rather about recovering from injuries. My recollection is that it's found in Southern dialects, but I haven't had much luck yet.

Off the top of my head, the songs I can think of with this pronunciation are "When You're in Love with a Beautiful Woman" by Dr. Hook and "More Than a Woman" by the Bee Gees. All three of these songs have something in common - both of them have the stress fall on the 'wo' part of 'woman.' "Margaritaville" and "More Than A Woman" also have the high note on the 'wo' part. We know from past articles that stress and pitch can result in singers changing a vowel's place to be easier to sing. It seems that our twin suspects of stress and pitch, combined with pop music's penchant for borrowing features from Southern and African American Vernacular Dialects, might be to blame.

But here's the rub - this usage seems to be restricted to the 70s. "Margaritaville" was released in 1977. "When You're in Love With a Beautiful Woman" was released in 1976. "More Than A Woman" was released in 1977. While I feel like I've encountered other examples of this phenomenon, they've been songs from the 70s. Not the 60s or before, not the 80s or after. Is this a short-lived trend that caught fire in the mid-70s? Is it possibly related to the peak of disco music (only "More Than A Woman" can conceivably be called disco, but I think the Bee Gees used this pronunciation on other disco-era songs)? Why did it drop off so suddenly? This is one of my Unsolved Linguistic Music Mysteries (that could surely have a better name).

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