Grammar with Lubna: The trace of trays ... and other such oddities of English

I visited Ikea a little while ago, and saw a lovely sign, “Put away your trays and leave no trace’. Why did I think this sign lovely?

Well, it started when a friend of mine told me a funny story about what happened to him. B is an engineer, always conscious, and telling me that his English is not great, but he’s actually a wonderful communicator in so many other ways. He was in the US, as he always is, and was with his American colleague when he decided to boast that even though his English wasn’t great, at least he was bilingual and could speak Mandarin. So his American friend asked him, “How do you say ‘rice’ in Chinese”? B then replied, “Which ‘rice’?” At this point, I expected B to then talk about the difference between cooked and uncooked rice, or something to that effect ..., but instead, he went on to add, “Do you mean (and he spelt out the following two words) R-I-C-E or R-I-S-E?”

At this point, some of you are laughing because it’s funny, and some of you are going ‘huh?’ because you would have asked the same thing. Your reaction depends on whether or not you say ‘rice’ in the same way you say ‘rise’. B’s American friend says them differently, as would most American and British English speakers. ‘Rice’ has an ‘s’ sound at the end, while ‘rise’ has a ‘z’ sound at the end. Many Singaporeans say these two words in the same way, with an ‘s’ sound at the end. The same goes with ‘trace’ and ‘trays’: ‘trace’ has an ‘s’ sound at the end, while ‘trays’ has a z sound at the end in American English as well as British English.

So, I began with some phonetics, and you’re now wondering what this has to do with grammar? Well, actually it’s got a lot to do with grammar – specifically, about the pronunciation of suffixes on plural noun forms (e.g. ‘pens’, ‘books’, ‘shoes’), third person singular verb forms (e.g. ‘sits’, ‘sings’, ‘jumps’). Not many people realise that the same suffix can and should be pronounced in different ways, and that they are not always said the way they are spelt. So, ‘trays’, for example, although spelt with the plural ‘s’ suffix, is pronounced with a final z sound. (Just a note to say that I’m not going to use phonetic symbols such as those in the IPA as everyone may not be able to read such phonetic symbols.]

The difference in how these different suffixes are pronounced depends on what kind of sounds these words end in. When the word ends in voiceless sounds, i.e. sounds where your vocal cords don’t vibrate, such as the p, t, f, and k sounds, we say an s sound for the plural or singular third person suffix. In contrast, when the word ends in voiced sounds, i.e. sounds where your vocal cords vibrate, such as the vowel and b, d, v, g, m, n, ng sounds and, we say a z sound for the plural or singular third person suffix.

So we say ‘beats’ as it is spelt, i.e. beats; just as we do for ‘picks’, ‘puffs’, ‘hops’ where the suffix is pronounced as s. However, say. Similarly for all words ending with voiced sounds, we say z for the suffix, we say beadz for ‘beads’, harmz for ‘harms’, singz for ‘sings’, trayz for ‘trays’, blurbz for ‘blurbs’, and leavez for ‘leaves’ but we say leafs for ‘leafs’, soaks for ‘soaks’ and shops for ‘shops’. And of course, when the word ends in a s, z or similar sounds like sh, ch or dge (as in ‘judge’), we can’t just put a s or z sound for the plural or third person singular. Instead, we put an ‘es’, which, if you haven’t already guessed, is pronounced as iz. So we say horsiz for ‘horses’, hatchiz for hatches, and judgiz for ‘judges’

This same voicing rule – where suffixes must match the voicing feature of the sound that it follows – also applies to the past tense morpheme. So even though we spell the regular past tense with ‘ed’, we don’t say it the same way. So, it’s ropt for ‘roped, but we say robd for ‘robed’. Here the difference is between the final voiceless p sound at the end of the word ‘rope’ and the final voiced b sound at the end of ‘robe’. Similarly it’s sackt for ‘sacked’ and saggt for ‘sagged’; and platid for ‘plated’.

Posted by Lubna Alsagoff on December 16, 2011 at 2:41am