Linguists weigh in on the 'bigly' vs. 'big league' debate
One of the many verbal mysteries of Donald Trump is whether the GOP presidential nominee is saying "bigly" or "big league."
Over the course of his campaign he has said what sounds like the grammatically grating "bigly" at numerous debates, press conferences, rallies and campaign events.
At Wednesday's debate he brought it out again.
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This time, though, the linguists were on it.
Susan Lin, an assistant linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, posted her definitive answer Wednesday evening to the linguist Facebook group Friends of Berkeley Linguistics.
"'Bigly' or 'big league'? The latter, I'm quite sure," Lin said on the group page.
To defend her declaration, she included a spectrogram, a visual chart showing the phonetic pronunciation of words. Think of it as a voiceprint instead of a fingerprint. Based on her analysis, Trump introduces a second "G" sound as he ends the word, forming the clipped "league" in "big league."
The linguist community was quick to chime in. Tara McAllister Byun, a New York University linguist, passed along the findings, as did other linguists, noting that the velar pinch toward the end really seals the deal.
We'd probably still be debating this mystery way beyond election day if it weren't for these linguists, big league.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
