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I'm Too Sexy For My Name
Scientific research conclusively demonstrates that I'm one sexy motherfucker:
Linguist Amy Perfors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, US, placed photos with fake names on a website called "Hot or Not", which allows viewers to rank strangers' photos for attractiveness.Excellent. I always find it interesting when I'm traveling how few foreign languages seem to contain the "aaa" sound in "Matt" (I, unlike the good people at the New Scientist, understand the use-mention distinction) -- the Icelandic are, alongside people who just happen to speak English extremely well, the only people in my experience who can pronounce it correctly. Everyone else winds up alternating between "Mott" and "Mate."She found that men labelled with names including "front vowels," such as the "aaa" sound in Matt were rated as more attractive by website viewers than photos labelled with "back vowel" names, such as the "aw" sound in Paul. The opposite was true for women's names.
August 11, 2004 | Permalink
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Comments
When I went to MIT, it was still in Cambridge.
Posted by: The Bobs | Aug 11, 2004 4:04:03 PM
Matt = Sexy MF? Perhaps.
Matt Looks Like a Man? Perhaps not - from the same article:
"It may seem counterintuitive that men named with the smaller-sounding front vowel are rated as more attractive. But other studies have shown that men with slightly feminine features are considered more desirable, says Perfors. “Maybe women are subconsciously looking for more sensitive or gentle men,” she says. "
;-)
Posted by: T: Central | Aug 11, 2004 4:10:57 PM
That ActForLove girl on the left is pretty sexy. What's her name?
Posted by: JP | Aug 11, 2004 4:32:21 PM
This whole study sounds like a damn lie. Junk science, I tell you, JUNK SCIENCE!
--Paul
Posted by: chilly | Aug 11, 2004 4:45:36 PM
"the Icelandic are, alongside people who just happen to speak English extremely well, the only people in my experience who can pronounce it correctly."
Well, I can name quite a few other peoples who can pronounce that particular sound: the Japanese certainly can, as can pretty much any of the ethnic groups within Nigeria's borders, so that makes about an extra 260 million people.
While we're at it, if having front vowels in one's name makes one sexier, then by rights I ought to be considered the sexiest of them all, as my name has nothing *but* the frontmost of front vowels in it.
Posted by: Abiola Lapite | Aug 11, 2004 5:04:24 PM
"as my name has nothing *but* the frontmost of front vowels in it."
Er, actually, that wasn't quite right, as there's a dipthong in the middle (you'd think I'd know my own name well enough!), but hey, two out of three is close enough.
Posted by: Abiola Lapite | Aug 11, 2004 5:06:40 PM
Note that UK English does not include the "short" A vowel sound either. British people would pronounce "Mawt" or "Mawthew"
Oh, and Abiola: you're wrong about Japanese. The 'A' vowel sound in the Japanese language is just like 'A' in Spanish, or UK English. Not like the short vowel sound in "Matt."
Perhaps Japanese people could pronounce "Matt" if they heard a lot of American English and gave it a good solid effort, but it's not a natural sound in their language. And in my experience, Japanese people are pretty bad at English, despite studying it for many years in school...
Posted by: next big thing | Aug 11, 2004 6:00:35 PM
sheep can make that sound
Posted by: dc | Aug 11, 2004 6:08:47 PM
Note that UK English does not include the "short" A vowel sound either. British people would pronounce "Mawt" or "Mawthew"
????????????????????????????????????
Am I missing something here? Surely Matt is pronounced the same way as cat, bat, hat, that and so on. Do these words not contain "short" A vowel sounds?
And while I'm here, just a mention that "UK English" is a pretty broad church - people in Glasgow, Manchester and London (for example) all speak UK English but the differences in accent are HUGE.
Ditto on the sheep thing BTW. And yes, Jones is a Welsh surname...
Posted by: Jones | Aug 11, 2004 6:28:54 PM
Jones:
You're right, "UK English" is too broad a term. I should have said "London English", because that's what I'm most familiar with. But I think my claim would apply also to the accents of Liverpool, Glasgow or Cardiff. (My native tongue is American English, btw)
But anyway, my main point is that the people of the UK (or London, whatever) don't say the vowel in "Matt bat hat cat" the way Americans say it. The vowel is a mix between the "short" American a vowel and the "long" a sound of Spanish.
Posted by: next big thing | Aug 11, 2004 6:41:31 PM
Note that UK English does not include the "short" A vowel sound either. British people would pronounce "Mawt" or "Mawthew"
That's a revelation to me, seeing as I've spent many years living both in the UK and the US ...
Oh, and Abiola: you're wrong about Japanese. The 'A' vowel sound in the Japanese language is just like 'A' in Spanish, or UK English. Not like the short vowel sound in "Matt."
Again, this is a rather, shall we say, dubious statement. I do speak the language after all - 日本語も分かりますよ。それが本当じゃなうです。
Posted by: Abiola Lapite | Aug 11, 2004 7:19:13 PM
I don't know if anyone cares, but the Lithuanian "e" sound (without a dot over it) is basically the same as the sound in American "Matt" or "cat".
I believe the Finnish and Estonian "" (a with umlaut over it) is supposed to be the same, but I don't have enough experience with native speakers of those languages to know really.
Generally, unless you've studied linguistics and phonology, you won't pronounce a language's vowels correctly unless they're in your native language. You can get the consonants right, but it's very hard to adjust the English "o" to the short French "o" without significant immersion.
Posted by: Cryptic Ned | Aug 11, 2004 7:29:10 PM
Abiola, I speak (and read) Japanese also. I have lived in UK, US, and Japan. I'm surprised that you disagree with me about the vowel sounds, but I don't know what else to say to convince you.
How do you get hiragana and kanji into HTML? That's pretty cool. Anyway, you wrote:
"Nihongo mo wakarimasu yo. Sore ga hontou ja nau desu."
You made a spelling mistake (or an HTML mistake, I guess). It should be "...ja nai desu."
Posted by: next big thing | Aug 11, 2004 7:51:57 PM
Men with women's names are unsexy. Fuck. I knew I should have changed my name to "Clint".
Posted by: Jaquandor | Aug 11, 2004 7:58:04 PM
"And in my experience, Japanese people are pretty bad at English, despite studying it for many years in school..."
The explanation I've gotten for that (from Japanese, mind you) is that, traditionally at least, they made it a point to teach only to read English, out of, I gathered, that charmingly distinctive xenophobia of theirs. I've heard Japanese sensitive to English pronunciation approximate the "front vowel" "aaa" in "Matt," "cat," "nancy," "fancy panties," etc. but it always tends to collapse into that "eh" sound as in "genki."
Posted by: Spacetoast | Aug 11, 2004 8:22:29 PM
I'm pretty sure that next big thing is correct and that the "a" in "Matt" and "cat" is not in Japanese (which I studied for 3 years but am very far from an expert in). What would the romaji or hiragana be for it? The various "a" sounds in "hiragana", for example, are a different sound.
Posted by: Yu Li | Aug 11, 2004 8:24:40 PM
Yu Li:
Bingo. Given that the Japanese language only has five basic vowels (A I U E O) -- which are pronounced almost exactly the same as A I U E O in Spanish -- there's no way to pronounce "Matt cat hat bat" etc. as a native American speaker would. Even with dipthongs, you can't make the right sound.
Posted by: next big thing | Aug 11, 2004 9:29:21 PM
The problem I have with this report -- and I find New Scientist highly credible, and I blog articles from it several times a week on average -- is that if one actually bothers to look at the quite famous hotornot.com, you can see that in no case is anyone allowed to have a name attached to a photo.
Which makes the claims of the study a tad suspect, if not downright inexplicable. Does it not?
Posted by: Gary Farber | Aug 11, 2004 10:04:35 PM
You made a spelling mistake (or an HTML mistake, I guess). It should be "...ja nai desu."
Yes, you're right. Caught out by my short-sightedness!
As for your question as to how I entered in the Japanese characters, I simply use the IME interface that comes with Windows 2000/XP/2003. It automatically carries out the conversion to the correct Unicode encodings.
Posted by: Abiola Lapite | Aug 11, 2004 11:02:50 PM
"there's no way to pronounce "Matt cat hat bat" etc. as a native American speaker would."
The problem is, when you say "native American speaker", what exactly do you mean? Are you talking about Bostonians, New York's Bridge & Tunnel Crowd, Alabamans, Texans, Midwesterners, Valley Girls? It simply isn't meaningful to just say "native American speaker" and leave it at that.
As far as I'm concerned at least, I can detect no difference whatsoever between the short Japanese "a" to be heard in 何 and the corresponding sound in the word "Matthew", which, for the record, seems to be pronounced exactly the same both in British RP and in whatever the name is for that generic accent used by American newscasters. I say this despite having a keener ear for these things than most, being also a native speaker of a language which requires greater sensitivity to this question than do most Romance or Germanic languages.
Posted by: Abiola Lapite | Aug 11, 2004 11:11:52 PM
"The various "a" sounds in "hiragana", for example, are a different sound."
You've obviously forgotten a lot more of what you learnt than you think you did if you can say this. There's only one single character in hiragana for "a", and that is あ。Perhaps you're thinking of か、さ、た and な？
Posted by: Abiola Lapite | Aug 11, 2004 11:15:55 PM
Abiola, a couple things:
Yu Li said nothing wrong in saying The various "a" sounds in "hiragana", for example, are a different sound. There are three 'a' vowel sounds in the word, all almost identical. Obviously you write three different characters (ra, ga, na), but it's clear what Yu Li is trying to say. (The only reason the three vowel sounds are not perfectly sonically identical is that the different consonant sounds require different mouth/tongue movements leading into the 'a' sound...) The 'a' vowel sound here is very different from the 'a' vowel sound spoken by, say, a Michigan resident in pronouncing "Matt cat hat rat."
In the case of Peter Jennings at least, and Ashleigh Banfield, and a few others, the generic American accent is called "Canadian." Ha ha...
Posted by: next big thing | Aug 11, 2004 11:33:12 PM
Yes, I meant exactly what next big thing said. I obviously realize/remember that there is only one hiragana for the separate sound "a." That's why I said "the 'a' SOUNDS." My point was that all the "a"-type vowel sounds in "hiragana" (as parts of the mora (?) "ra," "ga," "na" are different from the way I assume Matt (who grew up in New York City, I believe, and spent four years in the Boston area) pronounces the vowel "a" in his given name. Hope this most weighty issue has neared resolution.
Posted by: Yu Li | Aug 12, 2004 1:08:25 AM
Abiola-
I can detect no difference whatsoever between the short Japanese "a" to be heard in 何 and the corresponding sound in the word "Matthew"
Do you hear a difference between "math" and "moth"? because that's exactly the difference between "na" in "nan/nani" and "ma" in "matthew" as far how the latter is pronounced in the US. I suppose there are Americans who have spent time in the UK or whatever who've affected, or anyway acquired, the other pronunciation, but there is no American dialect I know of in which it's prounounced "Moth-yoo," or "Moth-mohtics"--definitely none of those you mentioned.
Posted by: spacetoast | Aug 12, 2004 2:00:20 AM
Er, I take that "exactly" back because it seems to me that first phoneme in "moth" varies somewhat more than I was thinking, but you get the idea.
Posted by: spacetoast | Aug 12, 2004 2:48:29 AM
