Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 January 27

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January 27

Usage of "gotten" in Australia

A few years ago I met a young (under 25) Australian woman who often used the word "gotten", which I had thought was confined to North America. She had never lived outside of Australia, but I got the impression that she watched a lot of American television. Do Australians commonly use "gotten" in their daily speech? Or was this simply an Americanism that she had picked up from foreign media? LANTZY^TALK 01:56, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

Gotten is listed as used in "now chiefly Canada, US, Ireland, Northern British". So, did her family immigrate from any of those regions ? That might be another source. StuRat (talk) 02:32, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

She has an Italian surname, so probably not. I was aware that some northern Englanders use "gotten", for instance I've heard the YouTuber Tom Scott (from Nottinghamshire) using it, and in his case I supposed it was a local thing, not an Americanism. LANTZY^TALK 04:29, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

Speaking as a casual observer of younger Australians speaking on Australian TV, one can say that the p.p. "gotten" is no longer confined to North America. I would say that many younger Australians commonly use "gotten" in their daily speech. Djbcjk (talk) 04:04, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! I was curious if this was an imported thing with a generational character, and it sounds like that is indeed the case. LANTZY^TALK 04:29, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

As you can see by the irate comment at the bottom of the Macquarie Dictionary website's blog, it annoys the hell out of some people. About 16 minutes into this podcast there's a more about the origin and its prevalence. (Don't listen to the rest, it's people who don't understand how language changes and communication works calling in with naive questions.) I use it, but I'm hardly a model of purism in these things: it's perfectly clear what "8 items or less" means, doesn't startle my jumbuck at all. Not wanting to pickle your wombats any further, take a galah's beak at Australian slang quiz: How ocker is your knowledge?

Pete AU aka --Shirt58 (talk) 04:27, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for that Macquarie link. I'm not surprised that it's a bone of contention for some people. LANTZY^TALK 04:29, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I've heard it here too. Many novomundane variations have crept in via American television shows. The most recent I've noticed is the adjective "alternative" being replaced by "alternate", American pronunciation and all (ALL-tə-nət). -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 04:25, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

That's the Boston pronunciation, maybe, or somewhere in the South? In General American, we pronounce the r. --Trovatore (talk) 15:02, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

We reject your rotten rhotics.  :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:29, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

I didn't realize that "alternate = other" was an Americanism. To my ear it just sounds sort of corporate, or over-formal. LANTZY^TALK 04:29, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

sort of corporate corporative - FTFY. No such user (talk) 21:19, 29 January 2017 (UTC)

If "gotten" irritates you, there's also "boughten". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:51, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

I was amazed to discover that my Okie relatives actually use "boughten". They use it exclusively to mean "store-bought", as in a store-bought cake. I doubt if this one will make it to Australia. LANTZY^TALK 04:29, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

... and "putten" is still occasionally heard in Yorkshire dialect along with "gotten". Dbfirs 08:29, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

Wow, I never heard of that one. LANTZY^TALK 04:29, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

"Putten on the Ritz". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:30, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

A side thought: Isn't American gotten sounded like garden for a Brit/Aussie (not exactly, but very close)?--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 13:48, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

Not really. "Gotten" has a more rounded vowel than "garden", and the middle consonant in "Gotten" is more t and in "garden" is more ɾ (alveolar flap). That even ignores the rhoticity issue. --Jayron32 15:47, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

Nothing like. See Short O: Separated by an Uncommon Vowel. Alansplodge (talk) 16:04, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

I mean American gotten /gɑːɾn̩/ and British garden /gɑːdn̩/. Sound too similar. If a non-American adopts Americanisms through listenning it must be amusing to listen to how Americans so often guard it and have garden.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 18:35, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

It would be quite tricky (I imagine) to acquire the American pronunciation of some vowels while retaining the native pronunciation of others. Possible perhaps, but I've never heard it. Alansplodge (talk) 01:34, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

I've just tried to imagine how a mind of a speaker works, when that speaker of one accent hears something very different and somewhat alien from another accent, transposes the heard words into one's own accent and then adopts the foreign usage.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 11:16, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

Yes, when I'm not really listening and I hear an American voice on British radio, my brain sometimes makes a decoding error and interprets a word such as /ˈɡɑːɾn̩/ as a northern /ˈɡäːdn/ (d not really sounded as a proper plosive, is it ɖ or ɟ or dⁿ or d̚ in IPA?), and I have to re-listen in my short-term memory to recognise American vowels and to decode the correct word. This happens very quickly, and I don't remain puzzled for more than a fraction of a second. I tried this out on Wiktionary's sound file, but that doesn't work there because they say /ˈɡɑʔn̩/ with a glottal stop and a short /ɑ/ which might be mistaken for the surname Garton when the t is glottalised. Dbfirs 00:12, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

We had some Australian and NZ students on a voluntary work placement here in the UK last summer. One of the girls had a pretty standard Australian accent, but many of the phrases she used were puzzling until she played a DVD of High School Musical and all became apparent. Alansplodge (talk) 16:46, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

Can you recall any specific examples? LANTZY^TALK 04:29, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

"Oh my Gaaahd! How do you even do that?" springs to mind. Alansplodge (talk) 09:53, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

"Plow" vs "plough" in historical British English

Some time ago, I wrote a brief article on the English folk song, "The Farmer's Boy". I quoted the full lyrics from a book published in London in 1857 called Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England, which includes the repeated line, "To plow and sow, and reap and mow, / And be a farmer's boy." Today, User:BobGun has come along and changed "plow" to "plough" which is the modern British spelling. I've changed them all back again, but I need to know when and why we Britons changed from one spelling to the other please, so that I can state my case on the article's talk page. American editors will kindly refrain from being too smug for retaining the more sensible spelling all along. Alansplodge (talk) 16:34, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

The spelling in "-ough" is older, and was standard in British English from 1700. It represents how the word used to be pronounced. The OED says "As regards the developments shown by the forms of the word within English, the regular Old English inflection of plōh (also, with failure of devoicing of the final consonant, plōg ) would be dative plōge , genitive plōges , nominative plural plōgas , giving in early Middle English ploh , ploȝe , ploȝes , and in later Middle English singular plouh , plowh , or plowgh , plural plowes ; as these became homophonous in modern English there is levelling of the spellings to either plough , ploughs , or plow , plows ; the former has been the accepted spelling in England since approximately 1700, while the latter is usual in the U.S." DuncanHill (talk) 16:42, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for that. However we have "plow" in 1857; was that still an accepted variant then, or just being deliberately archaic? Alansplodge (talk) 16:56, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

I would suspect, from the context, it was an archaism or an attempt to represent how a farmer's boy might spell. Mr Denham of Piersebridge might be able to tell you more. DuncanHill (talk) 17:30, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

EO says plough is an "alternative spelling" of plow.[1] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:28, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

Shakespeare used both spellings, as did early bibles (the King James bible used "plough" only once, but the Douay-Rheims bible used "plough" throughout). Both spellings were in common use, with plow possibly more common until about 1760 when plough became the standard British spelling with plow rapidly falling out of use. In American English, plough was also the most common spelling until about 1905 when plow became the usual spelling. (Research from OED & Google + ngrams.) Dbfirs 18:04, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

It's not clear exactly when the song was written (any time from 1700 onwards?), but in 1659, John Gauden wrote " If they may eate and drink, plow and sow, buy and sell ...", and in 1683 John Scott wrote " before he can plow and sow ...", but in 1699 Simon Patrick wrote "where they might plough, and sow, and reap ...". In the 1700s, "to plough and sow" seems to be at least twice as common as "to plow and sow" in Google Books. In the early 1800s, "to plow and sow" was used by James Marsh in 1830 and by Albert Barnes in 1841, but "to plough and sow" was used ten times as often in Google Books. This seems to indicate that if the song was written early then it might just use common spelling, but if written in the mid-1800s then it was probably deliberate dated spelling. Dbfirs 18:32, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

Thank you all kindly. Alansplodge (talk) 19:38, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

It's fun to imagine all those British sharecroppers out pluffing for their lords. μηδείς (talk) 21:07, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

A rough-coated, dough-faced ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough, coughing and hiccoughing thoughtfully. Dbfirs 22:56, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I found their Winter season a little disappointing too. Martinevans123 (talk) 23:08, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

I was once in a training course where the Biblical quote "they shall beat their swords into plowshares" was used in a presentation, except the assistant had made a typo and it came out as "they shall beat their swords into flowshares". In that situation it actually worked quite well. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:27, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

• Completely separate from the spelling issue, you should explicitly attribute the lyrics you copied: they are a direct copy from your (public domain) source: see WP:Plagiarism. In this case I think you should place the entire section in a block quote. Since this is a direct quote, the other editor should not edit it to "correct" the spelling spelling. -Arch dude (talk) 04:47, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the reminder User:Arch dude, but it's already in a blockquote (poem). Click "edit" and see for yourself Alansplodge (talk) 09:50, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

• Indeed, and I used the term incorrectly. Furthermore, In my opinion our attribution rules are too stringent and your reference more than suffices. However, If you add inline attribution at the bottom of the poem (e.g., ":from Bell, Robert (1857). Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England. London: John W Parker and Son. pp. 148–149.) then it is obvious to the reader (not just the editor) that you are quoting, and this means the quoted spelling must not be changed.