Talk:-ness

Should it really be Suffix giving a verb a nounal meaning? I believe it should rather be "an adjective" - think of blue - blueness, kind - kindness and so on. \Mike 13:44, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Blueness and kindness can be used to describe an object or person indirectly, but they are grammatically used as nouns. For example, one may ask, "What gives the sky its blueness?", but it would be incorrect to say, "Why is the sky so blueness", or to say, "she is very kindness". This is why they are classified as nouns rather than adjectives.

I was surprised to see that you have been active recently given the age of this question! - excarnateSojourner (talk|contrib) 22:41, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

Canadian pronunciation

As a native Canadian English speaker, I believe I usually pronounce it /nɪs/, but I would like to get a second opinion before adding this as the Canadian pronunciation. Also, if anyone knows what sound ɪ̈ represents, I would like to know (as it does not seem to appear in the IPA key). - excarnateSojourner (talk|contrib) 22:49, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

I can help with that! :) The diaeresis above the ɪ is meant to indicate a sound that is more centralized than normal, so the diaeresis can be used with any vowel symbol. In English the /ɪ/ sound is not as close to /i/ as the symbol ɪ by itself typically denotes in other languages. Alternatively, maybe the person who used ɪ̈ is suggesting the sound in this case is even more centralized than the typical /ɪ/ in English. --Webspidrman (talk) 19:39, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Ok, thank you. - excarnateSojourner (talk | contrib) 05:46, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

accustomedness, happiness, sickness, and darkness all list /-nɪs/ as an accepted pronunciation (often the US pronunciation). - excarnateSojourner (talk | contrib) 20:02, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

/nɛs/ pronunciation is obsolete??

That /nɛs/ is an "obsolete" pronunciation is entirely contrary to my own experience: the pronunciation /nɪs/ exists for sure, but /nɛs/ is the way I've pronounced it all my life as a native-born American (and I'm young), and it seems to be a completely normal pronunciation in my area and may even be the default pronunciation here. (Why is it so hard for people to accept that some people may pronounce a word differently than they do?) If there are no objections with others, rather than count it as "obsolete" I would like to add /nɛs/ as a possible pronunciation in the American section. --Webspidrman (talk) 19:39, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

I had been waiting to see if someone would respond to what I had written before making a change. In the meantime, it seems that someone has added /nɛs/, but under the qualification of "obsolete or dialectal". I appreciate the addition of "dialectal", but given that the entry for -ess has /ɛs/ as the default pronunciation, I'm not convinced that /nɛs/ ought to be segregated out from the other pronunciations for Americans, especially under the qualification "obsolete" which I strongly suspect is erroneous (after all, many different pronunciations of words in English may exist harmoniously and simultaneously [edit: even in the same areas], whereas most countries endorse only one particular spelling even if in practice different ones endorse different spellings).

The pronunciation /nɛs/ for -ness is consistent with /ɛs/ for -ess, and I doubt the average native speaker of English consciously pronounces one or the other differently but simply defaults to one of the aforementioned pronunciations (/(n)ɪ̈s/, /(n)ɛs/, /(n)əs/, etc.) without hearing the distinction between the similar vowels except for the presence or absence of /n/. Therefore the phoneme is often heard to be the same, even if the exact phonetics may differ. In my opinion all of these pronunciations are extant, even /nɪs/ which was indicated as the pronunciation of the Canadian speaker above, but for some reason has since been removed from the official page (probably during the last edit). Our job is merely to give some indication of the range of pronunciation, which is the best that can be hoped for with natively spoken English anyway, as unlike some other languages many approximate pronunciations often exist for a word with a single spelling.--Webspidrman (talk) 02:20, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

I neglected to include /nɛs/ as a primary pronunciation due to its absence in other dictionaries. While I have the suspicion that their failure to include /nɛs/ is due to the vicissitudes of the lexicographical tradition rather than its actual absence from mainstream usage, I feel solid evidence of its general currency is needed before I can feel comfortable including it as a pronunciation generally accepted and received by speakers; one anecdote is not sufficient here. I agree with you that a speaker community may maintain multiple pronunciations of the same word (or suffix, as in this case), but allowing the theoretical possibility of two pronunciations coexisting is not sufficient to prove that these two specific pronunciations actually coexist for this specific morpheme. As for the designation of /nɛs/ as "obsolete", it is based on the sober analysis lexicographical evidence; generally speaking, older dictionaries predominantly list pronunciations of the /nɛs/ type, while the majority of newer dictionaries list ones of the /nəs/ type.

Your equation of the pronunciation of -ness /nɛs/ with -ess /ɛs/ may be accurate for the type of pronunciation that you possess, but it does not hold for all speakers; the dictionaries generally distinguish -ness /nəs/ from -ess, which they have as /ɛs/ in a few words (e.g. princess), /ɪs/, /əs/ in others (e.g. waitress), or all three in the vast majority. While this could be a crude attempt at displaying the kind of variation that you attest to, I generally place more faith in lexicographers than that, especially as this kind of distinction obtains in my own speech; I consistently have /nəs/ in -ness and /es/ in princess, though I have variation between /es/ and /əs/ in e.g. countess. (At least in my speech, this is not mere variation in the realisation of a phoneme; this is a clear contrast between two different phonemes.) This illustrates the great risk inherent in making generalisation based on one's own speech habits; a sample size of one is very small indeed. Hazarasp (parlement · werkis) 04:07, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

First of all, thank you so much for the thoughtful response. :) I have to admit I have become jaded by internet discussions becoming unproductive and hostile. I am sure I allow such responses to bother me too much, but it is nonetheless exhausting. Please rest assured I bear no ill-will whatsoever towards you and merely wish to increase the accuracy of the page. I apologize in advance for the length of my response! xD

I am enjoying reading your thoughts about the issue. I agree with your assessment that there appears to be for some speakers, including yourself (thank you for sharing), there is a phonemic difference in many cases between the vowels in -ness and -ess, even as for other speakers, including myself, there is no phonemic difference. Complicating the issue, like you I hear multiple pronunciations for -ess as well, including /əs/, /ɪs/, etc., in addition to /ɛs/. Adding to your observations, some speakers pronounce -ess as /əs/ and -ness as /nɪs/, and others say /ɛs/ for -ess and /nəs/ for -ness, to name a few examples: I agree that in these cases the vowels may be heard as two phonemes, but interestingly at other times they are not heard as such especially if the phonetic range is small. Likewise, I have also heard speakers frequently use the same vowel for both, leading to realizations such as /ɪs/ and /nɪs/, /əs/ and /nəs/, and in my case /ɛs/ and /nɛs/.

In my previous response, my intended meaning was to say that a difference in speech is not always a conscious attempt to distinguish between phonemes, and two sounds may be heard as distinct phonemes or as the same phoneme by different listeners if they are phonetically close enough. This is may be the reason for the transcription /nɪ̈s/. To indicate a distinct phoneme in IPA, this would be properly written in phonemic (as opposed to phonetic) transcription as /nɘs/, /nɨs/, or /nes/ rather than /nɪ̈s/ (unless the transcriber was trying to indicate by the diaeresis that the /ɪ/ sound in English is in general more centralized than in other languages, which is true but perhaps not what the transcriber meant). Based upon my knowledge of informal practice in transcription, I strongly suspect that by using the symbol ɪ̈ in a phonemic transcription the transcriber is likely saying that the sound varies enough to be realized as multiple phonemes as opposed to being a unique phoneme in its own right: in other words, that it may be heard or even spoken as one of a few different phonemes of similar phonetic quality. Alternatively, the transcriber could have used /ə/, but this could have indicated /ə/ exactly in opposition to other phonemes, and it is likely that the transcriber was trying to avoid that.

As for why many dictionaries have begun to use /ə/ more often than they used to, I have read that this practice has caught on because English has many vowels of intermediate quality; so in an attempt to minimize the use of symbols, avoid writing multiple transcriptions, or both, many dictionaries choose to use /ə/ for a number of different sounds of varying degrees of centralization or lack thereof (I could get into detail about this topic but this response is already too long). Even though if only one vowel transcription is to be chosen /ə/ is often the least controversial one, as a number of linguists have noted (1) multiple transcriptions can coexist, (2) /ə/ is in itself a distinct phoneme in English which can lead to confusion if it is being used to indicate other phonemes, and (3) /ə/ is sometimes being written in cases in which /ə/ is not even heard or pronounced. As part of this backlash against transcribing /ə/ in all cases, I have read that some people are using other symbols such as /ɪ̈/ to indicate specific ranges of pronunciations apart from or instead of /ə/, even though such notations are still somewhat imprecise as they can be interpreted in different ways. In the case of -ness and -ess, I do think that /(n)əs/ is accurate in some pronunciations, though not in many others.

I do consider a "winner-takes-all" approach to lexicography an untenable position to maintain in English, so I agree with those who note that transcription of English is notoriously difficult and thus should be more carefully considered than is currently done; the fact that we are even having this discussion at all is because the page has declared /nɛs/ to be an obsolete pronuncation of -ness despite the fact that it is a completely normal pronunciation that I have both used and heard all my life. In many languages, especially those that have few vowels or lack strong tendencies towards centralization, one transcription may be good enough at least per accent, but the way that English has developed emphasizes spelling and de-emphasizes pronunciation, and so many attempts to single out one phonemic transcription when the case is ambiguous have, I think rightly, been criticized as reflecting the bias of the speaker/publisher. This isn't a question of older versus newer dictionaries either, as both are guilty of over-simplification and only differ in which transcription or pronunciation is being favored.

So in summary, I am drawing my opinion from linguists who note that in a number of cases a range of realizations appear to be present in how the spoken language pronounces certain words within a wide geographic spread; this leads me to maintain the attitude that the best that can be done in such instances is to denote what appears to be the extent of the range of pronunciation. I do not at all feel comfortable picking favorites, including with /(n)ɛs/ even though this pronunciation reflects my own speech.

Again, I apologize for writing so much; let me know if you need me to increase the spacing for ease of reading. I hope I didn't come across as pretentious; I'm just terrible at being concise when what I have to say is complex. xD --Webspidrman (talk) 08:16, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

I'll provide my thoughts on each of your to each your points in turn. Note that I'm not strongly attached to the classification of /nɛs/ as "obsolete or dialectal"; given all the fuss you're making about it, I might revise it.

In describing how some speakers have a phonemic distinction between -ness and (some words in) -ess while others don't, you pt the brunt of their emphasis on the way this is heard by other speakers. This is somewhat puzzling to me; surely it's worth to focus on each speaker's own (phonetic) realisation of these words and their (phonemic) internal representation of such? Additionally, you seem to be incorrectly extrapolating the situation in your own speech community; where I'm from, the contrast between the phonemes is unquestionable (though this may not obtain even in forms of speech very close to mine).

While the use of <ɪ̈> could've been a naive attempt to capture the sound's phonetic quality or intended to signify a phone that may be identified with one or another phoneme (you don't need to tell me that), those are not the only possibilities. It could've been used to indicate a archiphoneme; i.e. the neutralisation of /ə/, /ɪ/ in this environment (though this is usually written as <ᵻ> or <ɨ> AFAIK), or a combination of the three factors I've listed so far may have obtained, especially as they don't necessarily conflict; different speakers might perceive a archiphonemic //ɨ// as underlyingly being "/ɪ/" or "/ə/", making it precisely "a phone that may be identified with one or another phoneme". In any case, this etiological excursus is of little relevance; I think the use of <ɪ̈> here is a bad idea because of the ambiguity that we've commented on; I'll modify it to /nɪs/ the next edit.

I don't think you're quite right about dictionaries' rationale for using /nəs/. In my view, the real reason is much simpler: 18th-century dictionaries usually used /nɛs/ as it was the predominant pronunciation in the British standard back then (note that other standard Englishes hadn't developed yet). Over the 19th and 20th centuries, the pronunciation of -ness in the British standard (now christened with the newfangled appellation of /ˈɑː(ɹ)piː/; yes, it could be rhotic back then) began to change; first it became /nɪs/, then /nəs/; this was (more-or-less) faithfully reflected in dictionaries. As dictionaries for other varieties of English were built off of 19th/20th c. British models, /nəs/ was imported into them, even though they didn't reflect the full phonological variation in these varieties; after all, /nəs/ was a common variant in most major standard Englishes, and RP was the prestige variety all across the English-speaking world until the middle of the last century. The fact that </nəs/> makes for a good cover symbol for a good deal of phonological variation was initially nothing less than a fortuitous coincidence, though it no doubt ensured its continued persistence.

My objections to the use of /nɛs/ have nothing to do with a desire to maintain a limited number of transcriptions per morpheme; such a belief is part of my editing philosophy, but the addition of /nɛs/ would not go beyond my limit here. Instead, they are founded in what I see as insufficient evidence for /nɛs/ (as the best phonemic analysis for any given speaker, which may encompass several actual realisations) being a widespread pronunciation; I'm afraid your anecdata doesn't fully convince me. My comment about older dictionaries must be placed in this light; you seem to be fond of the idea that they are just favouring a different pole of a unchanging spectrum of variation, but I prefer to take their deviations from current transcriptional habit as reflecting real deviations in pronunciation unless there's evidence to suggest otherwise; we should be taking the past on its own terms rather than clumsily making present evidence into past assumptions. To make things clear, I am by no means suggesting that the use of phonemic transcription in lexicography has always been conducted without bias (in fact, my last paragraph posits a pretty substantial bias in the lexicographical tradition). I am only suggesting that bias shouldn't be used as a ad-hoc means to handwave away what may be matters of real significance.

Now let us return to the point. From the evidence of older dictionaries, it certainly appears that /nɛs/ was once the normative pronunciation; the question is where its former lofty status has left it in the mouths of today's speakers. You talk about "denoting the range of the pronunciation", but to successfully accomplish this, we must ascertain what that range is; this involves being careful not to mistake the small foothills of regional pronunciations and local idiosyncrasies for the mighty peaks that are worth capturing. I'm not claiming that /nɛs/ is a "regional pronunciation"; in fact, I suspect it is fairly widespread, at least in General American. But this suspicion is not a certainty, and you have gave me no real concrete evidence to make it one. This is what gives me doubts about adding /nɛs/ to -ness. Like I've said, I'll add it, but as long as all I have is a few anecdotes like yours (picked up in the course of my linguistic reading), the possibility that you've overestimated its prevalence will always remain. Hazarasp (parlement · werkis) 12:54, 4 February 2022 (UTC)