"have to" vs. "have to"

[pne]

Recently, there was an entry in linguaphiles about the different pronunciations of "have" and "has" - with [v] and [z] when they're an auxiliary or full verb in general, but with [f] and [s] when they're in the "have to/has to" construction indicating necessity. (Compare with "used" which has [z] as the past tense of "to use" but [s] in the construction "used to" indicating former habit.)

People commented on the fact that "have" is not always pronounced [f] when followed by "to", but only when the necessity meaning is intended, and entangledbank (whom I always enjoy reading from) produced a minimal pair:

You can make a minimal pair contrasting the meanings of 'have' and 'have to':

the three books I have to read

With [hæftə] it means I must read them; with [hæv tə] it means I have them so I could read them if I wanted.

Clever! Me likey.

Comments

[denial-land.livejournal.com]

how can you display the schwa and the other IPA symbols? HTML, ASCII? Is there a list?

IPA, Unicode, and HTML

[pne.livejournal.com]

In this case, I just copy-and-pasted them from the original comment. Whether they display or not tends to depend on the browser, the font used, whether it's on a friends page or in a single entry, and the phase of the moon.

If you can't type it or copy-paste from Character Map, you could use an HTML entity such as ə : ə

If all you have is ASCII, I'd write a schwa as @ (which is the ASCII IPA and the X-SAMPA representation -- two methods of representing IPA characters using only ASCII).

List, well... you could look at the Unicode IPA block (http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0250.pdf) (PDF file) and use the Unicode code points ABCD as ꯍ -- in this case, schwa is U+0259 so you could use ə (ə). I used to think that hexadecimal numbers (e.g. ə) are less well supported in HTML than decimal ones (e.g. &601;), but that may no longer be true as people tend to have newer browsers now.

And if you want a list of ASCII equivalents, then the two most popular variants, in my experience, are Kirshenbaum ASCII IPA (http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/index.html) and X-SAMPA (http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/x-sampa.htm). You may also like this version of the IPA chart with X-SAMPA equivalents overlaid in blue (http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/studerende/thorinn/xsamchart.gif). (There's also a similar one (http://www.melroch.se/cxschart.gif) using "CXS" -- CONLANG X-SAMPA -- which is a slightly modified version used on the CONLANG mailing list; the main difference is probably that ash (æ) is represented by "&" as in ASCII-IPA rather than by "{" as in "real" X-SAMPA.)

Re: IPA, Unicode, and HTML

[denial-land.livejournal.com]

wow, I didn't know it was that complicated!
I'll definitely look into it; thanks for writing it all out :)

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

That's *strongly* dialectical. I, for example, have [hæv tə] in both cases.

Actually, I think I have [hævtə] and [hæv tə] respectively. Stress pattern, and whatnot.

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary also mentions the [f] (and also the [v]) pronunciation in the case of "have to" meaning something similar to "must", and they try to give the standard pronunciation. And I think I've heard the [f]-pronunciation from speakers who don't speak a dialect.

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

Yes, I misspoke. It's dialect-dependent, not dialectical. I knew what I meant, if that that's any excuse.