Noncompositional

As has been widely observed, The Simpsons is absolutely chock-full of material for any language fan to sink her teeth into. So I thought I’d just contribute my small bit, in a couple of posts. This time I’ll focus on a line of Marge’s that involves a “Spoonerism”-type production error.

As I watched episode 1611 of the show (“On a Clear Day I Can’t See My Sister”), there were two particular lines that caught my ear. Now, this episode has already been noted for its demonstration of phonological reanalysis between a and an following an n-initial word (here, a nice coffee ~ an ice(d) coffee), but I guess a few were missed (or thought of as inconsequential). Both occur around the time that Homer and Marge enter the Sprawl-Mart store to find Homer’s father working as the greeter. Marge says,

“Grandpa, you’re a greet grater. I mean a great greeter. Now look who’s senile.”

Wikipedia has a short article on this sort of cross-word sound-switching phenomenon, and even includes a few French and Finnish examples. Thankfully, I found a page full of them in Japanese. Many of the examples (some attested, others contributed by acquaintances of the page author) result in nonse-words, but some get funny results (漢字 included in some cases for clarification, foreign words rendered in the ‘original’ language):

• cheesed bake cake < baked cheese cake
• fenimism < feminism
• corn shawnery <Sean Connery
• sengo-gensoo < gengo-sensoo (戦後幻想 ‘post-war illusion’ <言語戦争 ‘language wars’ [actually, it's not clear which, if either, is supposed to be derivative here])
• dai-en-dan <dai-dan-en (大縁談 ‘large marriage proposal’ <大団円 ‘denouement’ [by analogy from 応援団 oo-en-dan 'cheering group'?])
• shin-chi nin-ri gaku <nin-chi shin-ri gaku (心知認理学 ’study of mind-knowing ideal-recognizing ‘ < 認知心理学 ‘cognitive psychology’)
• sanbai haabisu < hanbai saabisu (三倍ハービス ‘three-times [harvest?]‘ < 販売サービス ’sales service’)
• mo-kee o totte-kite < to-kee o motte-kite (模型を取ってきて ‘take the model’ < 時計を持ってきて ‘bring the watch’)

Given that the culture of humor in Japanese is dominated by word-play, especially puns (which for some reason even WordNet points out via example sentence), I was surprised that there wasn’t more literature on this type of phenomenon in Japanese. But even the term for this type of speech error isn’t constant – I’ve seen 音位転換, 頭音転換, 頭音置換, and 音韻交替 among others. If I find more amusing ones I’ll post them.

And as for the second line, stay tuned…