Dreamtown Berkeley

The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station in downtown Berkeley is called — get ready for it — Downtown Berkeley. Until the mid-1990s, however, it was called just Berkeley, and this is still what the signs on the platform say. Not that it matters very much, since the signs can hardly be seen from the train anyway, and passengers must depend for orientation on the (not always very clear) announcements by the drivers. These give sometimes the old, sometimes the new name of the station.

But it is not BART that I mean to write about. It’s my dreams.

My dreams often involve travel, or some other kind of displacement, but the locales and means of travel are invariably surreal — they may involve train or car travel that begins in America and ends in Europe, or air travel between Berkeley and San Francisco. And the “Berkeley” of my dreams is nothing at all like the real Berkeley, any more than my “New York” or “Barcelona” is like its actual self. In my dreams I frequently experience enormous difficulties in getting to the airport and end up missing flights (usually just before waking up). I also often forget where I parked my car (something that happens in real life too).

My dreamtown Berkeley — where I still live in my dreams, despite having moved to El Cerrito nine years ago — is more like a European city, and rather than being part of a compact conurbation it is a separate place with streets leading into rural outskirts.

I was therefore intrigued, when I recently Isabel Allende’s latest novel, The Japanese Lover, by the focus of its action being a fictitious place called Lark House that is located on the outskirts of Berkeley (at least in the Spanish original, en las afueras de Berkeley — the reference is omitted in the English edition). Moreover, “[t]he property adjoined the bay”; in the real Berkeley there are no private properties adjoining the bay. And the Lark House neighborhood has its own square (plaza del barrio in the original) with a police station and a Starbucks.

Isabel Allende is known as one of the writers associated with the “magical realism” school. Perhaps my dreamtown Berkeley belongs there.

Incidentally, I have yet to read Allende’s El cuaderno de Maya (Maya’s Notebook), which, as I understand, also has Berkeley as one of its locales. Maybe I can find some more of my dreamtown there.

 

 

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Accents again

In a recent post I wrote about the variety of accents heard on the British TV show Line of Duty. But that was after seeing only the first two series.

When I started watching Series 3, I noticed that the character “Dot” Cottan, who is a detective and a criminal (I’m not giving anything away), and who had earlier sounded like a Londoner, was now speaking like a northerner, a difference that was not remarked on by any other character but that played a part in the plot. (The actor, Craig Parkinson, is a Lancashire native who grew up in London, so I suppose both accents are natural to him.)

The phone calls that “Dot” made in his criminal role continued to be (as he himself, as a detective, said) in “a London or Southeast accent,” and he used the fact to deflect suspicion from himself onto a fellow detective.

I wonder if, the gap between Series 2 and 3 being two years, the producers didn’t think that the audience would notice the change in accent. Since I watched the show on DVD within a short time span, it was blatant to me.

For me there was another unresolved mystery, unrelated to accents. The criminal who was actually Cottan was known to police as “the caddy.” In Series 1, when Cottan was first promoted, he made a speech referring to being encouraged to join the police by someone he had caddied for at a golf club. Why didn’t anyone remember that in the subsequent series?

 

Supermanagers

In a previous post I alluded to the loss of N’Golo Kanté as a possible factor in Leicester City FC’s dismal performance in the season at that time (only five wins in 25 league games), in contrast with their winning the Premier League championship the previous season. This poor record led to the firing of the celebrated coach Claudio Ranieri, who previously had been widely praised for last year’s miracle finish.

But something funny has happened since. Under the management of the unheralded Craig Shakespeare, who had never been anything but an assistant manager (and, for one game, a caretaker manager), the club has won not only three straight League games, but overcame a first-leg loss to Sevilla to win on aggregate and advance to the UEFA Champions League quarter-finals, the only English team to do so.

I have long been skeptical of the value of “supermanagers” (be they sports coaches, company CEOs, city managers, police chiefs, school superintendents, or university presidents), typically hired by the institution’s governing board amid great fanfare and after a national or international search, and usually based on the candidate’s supposedly stellar performance at another institution.

The hiring of celebrity architects for public buildings falls into the same category.

What such individuals have in common is a talent for self-promotion (I have written about one such specimen here and here, and another one here).

And what I used to find surprising is the ease with which the boards fall for the spiel. After all, corporate and institutional boards, city councils and the like are supposed to be made up of smart people, who — one would think — could see past the bullshit, as glibly as it may be presented.

But I am no longer surprised. They are, I have found, not all that smart. Typically, they have attained their positions as a reward for  some success in life, and this success (often due to luck) has led them to believe that they are smart. So that they are, in fact, under the same self-aggrandizing illusion as the candidates that they interview for management positions.

That makes it hard to see past the self-promotion.

 

A misrule of stress

A few years ago I watched a BBC historical documentary about ancient York and I was startled to hear the cultured-sounding narrator (obviously an actor trained to sound cultured) pronounce the second name of the emperor Septimius Severus as though were “sever us” (/’sɛvərəs/), since every reference gives the pronunciation as /sə’vɪərəs/  (“severe us”). I wondered where that had come from.

I am a long-time participant in international folk-dancing, and among the dances I liked to do are many from the Republic of Macedonia, with names such as kostursko, nevestinsko and ovčepolsko oro. The boldface syllables are the ones that are stressed, since stress in Macedonian is very regular: in native words of three or more syllables, the stress is always proparoxytone, that is, on the antepenultimate syllable. And yet almost everyone in the folk dance community says these words as paroxytone, that is, stressed on the penultimate, as if they were Polish (another language with regular stress, but with a different rule); this includes people who learned these dances from the famous Macedonian dance teacher and musician Pece Atanasovski, whose name they usually say as Atanasovski.

English is a language with notoriously irregular stress. Not only is not obvious from the written form of a polysyllabic word where the stress might be, but often there are different stress patterns for the same word. Sometimes the stress is different when the word is a noun and a verb (such as protest); sometimes the difference is transatlantic (as in café or contribute, or names such as Bernard, Maurice, Barnett or Burrell); and sometimes there is simply no agreement for a given word, such as address, detail, insurance and many others.

But when it comes to Latin words — by which I mean words taken directly from Latin, with no change in spelling — there is an old rule that such words, even if pronounced in the traditional “Anglo-Latin” way (with letters read according to their usual English values — the way well-known Latin names, words and phrases are usually pronounced, as well as Latin terms in law, medicine and astronomy), the original Latin stress is preserved. There is a caveat here: there are words of Latin origin  that came into Middle English from Old or Middle French and in the evolution into modern English recovered their Latin spelling. Examples include senator and liquor, which in Middle English were senatour and licour, oxytone (stressed on the last syllable) as in French. U.S. English has a great many such words — favor, honor, vigor and the like — which in British English have kept their medieval -our ending. Such words, if they have more than two syllables, don’t necessarily follow the rule.

According to this rule, then, there is no excuse for Severus. But the rule seems to have given way, in recent times — I don’t know how recent — to another one, applied as a kind of default to foreign-looking words that are relatively unfamiliar, namely that words ending in a consonant are read as proparoxytone, and those ending in a vowel are paroxytone.

The first part of this rule (which should be called a misrule) explains not only Severus but also such common words as abdomen (Latin abdōmen) or acumen (Latin acūmen); Donald Trump was unfairly (for a change!) ridiculed for saying the latter in the traditional way (as I do). Beyond Latin, it explains the common proparoxytone (mis)pronunciations of such names as Esteban, Vladimir, Wallander, Martínez (as heard from British soccer announcers), Istanbul, Stalingrad; and Hanover is the standard English form of Hannover.

The second part of the rule explains the usual pronunciations of incognito and patina (not stamina, which in common enough use to have kept its traditional stress, as are such words as Africa and America), where, oddly enough, the stressed i sounds like “ee” (as though the words were Spanish or Italian) and not the usual “long i” sounds in Anglo-Latin words (such as vagina). People who told me about the movie Ex Machina usually pronounced the second word as “masheena”

It also explains the common English pronunciations of  paprika, basmati and a great many Italian place and personal names such as Pesaro, Brindisi, Stefano, Cesare, Pecora — all proparoxytone in Italian — and Podestà (oxytone). In the movie Big Night, in which the main characters were supposedly Italian immigrants, the word timpano was pronounced timpano. The Irish surname Costello is invariably pronounced Costello in America (to be sure, the most famous Americans with that name — Lou and Frank — were not Irish and were not originally named Costello). Sofia, the name of the capital of Bulgaria (Sofiya in Bulgarian) is usually pronounced like the name Sophia. And then there’s karaoke, usually pronounced like “carry-okie.” Not to mention Bacardí, pronounced Bacardi (even in its own commercials) despite the prominent acute accent on its labels.

There are some exceptions to both parts of the rule, which I have yet to explore fully. I will write about them when I have done so.