Prosody
Scots vowels
Address to a haggis by Robert Burns, recited on 25 Jan
| Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie1 face, Great Chieftain o’ the Puddin-race! Aboon them a’ ye tak your place, Painch, tripe, or thairm2: Weel are ye wordy of a grace As lang ‘s my arm. The groaning trencher there ye fill, Your hurdies3 like a distant hill, Your pin wad help to mend a mill In time o’ need, While thro’ your pores the dews distil Like amber bead. | His knife see Rustic-labour dight4, An’ cut ye up wi’ ready slight , Trenching your gushing entrails bright, Like onie ditch; And then, O what a glorious sight, Warm-reekin5, rich! . . . Is there that owre his French ragout, Or olio that wad staw6 a sow, Or fricassee wad mak her spew Wi’ perfect sconner7, Looks down wi’ sneering, scornfu’ view On sic a dinner? |
1sonsie plump bringing good fortune Irish Gaelic ; 2thairm intestines Proto-Germanic: *þarmaz, German Darm ‘intestine’ ; 3 hurdies ‘buttocks’ possibly Middle English “hurdis”, obsolete term for lock or bolt ; 4dight ‘wipe’ German “dichten” ‘to write poetry, compose, or thicken’ ; slight ‘skill’, English ‘sleight of hand’ ; 5 reekin ‘steaming’ German ‘smoking, steaming’; Icelandic Reykjavik ‘steaming harbour’ 6staw ‘sicken’, equivalent to English stall + -some 7sconner ‘disgust’ skoneren ‘to shrink back; flinch’; possibly OD skun → OE shun
The Speech Chain
The diagram below shows the idea of a particular song is represented by two English words, encoded by the speech articulators as hisses, tones and stops in the air. In the listener’s inner ear the sound is decoded into nerve impulses. The Phonemic Processor submits about seven candidate phonemes to Working Memory. Working Memory outputs candidate words. Competing candidate words are submitted to the Morphosyntactic Processor for processing as competing candidate utterances. “Garden paths” are rejected and the most likely meaningful utterance is submitted to conscious thought.
