Monthly Archives: January 2013

occult

Posted on January 17, 2013 | 1 comment

Lurking in the occluded corners of word country, hiding in the flocculent tufts, dripping off succulents and mixing with the dust in the desiccated plains, is something occult.

Occult! Dark claws sink into your flesh at the word. A penetrating darkness occupies your occipital lobe like a succubus. Concealed, yes, concealed, this is what occult means, but even though they come from the same Latin celare these two words concealed and occult carry completely distinct cultures. What is occult is not merely hiding, and in some ways is the opposite: a crack in the eggshell of common reality. The inculcation of secrets may occur in closed chambers, but the dark corners you fear are right in front of you and you do not see them. You seek the simplest explanation, but you get your neck cut with Occam’s razor.

We may imagine a scene in a dark copse, an assembled cohort awaiting, the accursed brought bound. What is the occasion? A sacrifice? Not quite. J’accuse, says one. A toccata plays its staccato. Are you culpable? says another. Are you guilty of seeing what you should not have – or of not seeing what you should have? A chilling cachinnation echoes from among the elect, then silence as soon ensues, sliced only by the unsheathing of knives. The shackled figure sobs, bent; at last, in hiccups of lachrymose paroxysm, the word comes: Peccavi. And then the cuts begin to be made… the fabric is shorn into ribbons… the eyes are unbound and opened. You who would see and not hear, hear and not see, are now exposed, condemned to see. Accept your fate.

Do we see through a glass darkly? Through occult glass, that frosted pane that hides your nakedness in the shower as it lets in the diffuse light of external day? Or is it that we overlook small cooccurrences as our eyes make their saccades: through an ocular malocclusion, we see but do not see again and so mis-see? In medicine occult blood is not the stain on the wicked altar; it is bleeding that is not perceptible to ordinary inspection, blood that is mixed in with other bodily output in amounts too small to be detected without a sensitive test. So perhaps with the occult of the world. You see it but do not see it. You are acculturated; you overlook it in the clutter of accumulated rudera, of stuff and stucco. Perhaps it is simply too small, like the staphylococcus that occupies every square centimetre of your skin. Or perhaps it just escapes notice.

Is there a cult occult in our culture, not hidden behind a façade but actually a pattern in the façade that you can only see once you have seen? Look not for some wicked kind of Wicca or eccentric church of Cthulhu; stow your imaginations and your prejudices and occident-centrism. They merely misdirect. Sometimes you accept a sameness where there is a difference; on other occasions you see more, not less, than is there. You hide these facts from yourself; your doppelganger is just you again, carbon-copied. You see curled claws lurking in cracks but they are in actuality the crescent antishadows of an eclipse, one partly hidden sun reflected in many multiples.

So too with words: see what slips onto the page in the slippage between lip and copperplate. You hear a crack in the back, [k], and a break, [ks], but everywhere you see cc. You are not accursed; you are just inaccurate.

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A Word Taster’s Companion: The vowel circle

Posted on January 16, 2013 | 2 comments

Today: the fifth installment of my how-to guide for word tasting, A Word Taster’s Companion.

The vowel circle

Vowels are the blood of words. They’re what allow words to move, to project, to be sung.

As I’ve explained in “The world speaks in harmony,” what vowel you’re saying is determined by where your tongue constricts the airflow in your mouth. That can be anywhere in your mouth that allows air to pass through the middle. But, in practice, languages have typically between five and twelve sounds that are recognized as distinct vowel sounds, and as long as a sound is close enough to one of those, it will be interpreted as that sound. And the acceptable sounds – the phonemes – are, depending on the language, mostly or entirely in a somewhat circular arrangement around the mouth.

The single-sound vowel phonemes we have in English are these:

/u/ as in boot

/ʊ/ as in put

/o/ as in boat (actually a slight diphthong in most kinds of English – see below)

/ɔ/ as in bore

/ɑ/ as in bop

/a/ as in bar

/æ/ as in bat

/ɛ/ as in bet

/e/ as in bait (actually a slight diphthong in most kinds of English – see below)

/ɪ/ as in bit

/i/ as in beat

/ə/ as in but (when it’s said in a stressed syllable it’s a little different and is often written as /ʌ/) – our one vowel that’s right in the middle of the mouth

The letters in slashes like /e/ are the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols for the sounds. Slashes mean we’re talking about a phoneme – a sound that’s a recognized distinct sound in a language. When we’re talking about the actual sound that’s made, whether it’s the same as the phoneme or not, we use brackets, like [e].

Those single-sound vowels are called monophthongs by people who really want to or have to call them that. (Take a moment to taste that word, monophthong.) We also make a number of diphthongs – vowel sounds that move from one part of the mouth to another. They’re not two vowels, one said after another; a diphthong is a single phoneme, but it’s one that starts in one place and ends in another. You might call them vowel movements.

Here are diphthongs we make in standard Canadian English:

/ɔɪ/ as in boy

/aɪ/ as in by – Canadians often say it like [ʌɪ] before a voiceless consonant, as in bite

/eɪ/ as in bay (we tend to think of it as just /e/ – see above)

/aʊ/ as in how – Canadians often say it like [ʌʊ] before a voiceless consonant, as in bout

/ɪʊ/ as in hew (also said as /ju/ – j is the IPA symbol for the “y” sound)

/oʊ/ as in hoe (we tend to think of it as just /o/ – see above)

You’ll get some other diphthongs in some other dialects of English. Some even have triphthongs – a three-vowel movement, as in some southern US versions of words man: [aɪə]. But let’s not go crazy here just yet. You’re best off tasting words in your own dialect, so if that sound’s not in your dialect, let’s not worry too much about it now. (Oh, by the way: all versions of English are dialects, and everyone has an accent. Dialects are not just what other people speak, and accents are not just what other people have.)

OK, enough with the technical basics for a moment. Let’s do some more tasting. You already know, if you’re read “The world speaks in harmony,” that speech sounds are what they are because of harmonics. And you almost certainly know intuitively that some sounds seem higher or lighter and others seem lower or heavier. Those impressions have a lot to do with the second formant – the space in the mouth in front of the tongue. A sound like [o] or [u] tends more often to go with low, heavy, dark things; a sound like [i] goes more with high, light things. This doesn’t mean that all words with [o] and [u] must be for big things, et cetera, but if you’re using the sound for effect, that’s where you’re likely to head.

So… if I say I heard two things hit the floor and one went “plunk” and the other went “plink,” what do you assume about them?

If there are two characters in a children’s book and one is named Bobo and one is named Titi, what might your initial expectations be of them?

When you taste a word, you have to be aware of the vowels you’re using. But you also have to watch your impressions of the sound and feel and taste.

Let’s circle around your mouth with vowels. Start at [u] and move gradually and smoothly through [i], through [e], through [æ], through [a], through [o], to [u]. Then circle back in the other direction. Do it as smoothly as you can. Pay attention to what your tongue and your lips are doing.

Do you notice your lips rounding at [o] and [u] and unrounding as you go to the front? We do that in English. It’s a very normal contrast in languages the world over: round the back, unround the front. This heightens the contrast between the harmonics.

But it’s not a universal thing to round the back and unround the front. Many languages also have rounded front vowels and even unrounded back ones. (In fact, we have an unrounded low back vowel in English: /ɑ/.)

So now repeat the tongue circle exercise starting at [u], but this time keep your lips rounded as you move your tongue through the front vowels and back to [u]. Try both directions. It may help to pay more attention to what you’re doing and less to what you’re hearing. Unfocus, like when you’re watching fence posts go by on the highway and you go from counting them to watching them blur together.

Now start the loop at [i] and keep your lips unrounded all the way around, both directions.

Congratulations. You have, in the course of doing this, made several vowel sounds that never show up in English, including some that bedevil Anglophones trying to learn Turkish or Russian. You won’t need these sounds for tasting common English words, but the more you can do with your mouth, and the more you try to do with your mouth, the more fun you’re going to have. (I’m talking about language. Stop that.)

There are two other differences in vowel quality that you can make, neither of which makes a phonemic difference in English. One is what’s different between French beau and bon: whether the vowel is nasal or not – in other words, whether any air is passing through your nose while you’re saying it. In English, we do make some vowels nasal, but just when they’re before nasal consonants, as in some, sun, and sung. Sometimes the nasal consonant is dropped in casual speech and indicated just by the nasalization of the vowel, especially if there’s another consonant after the nasal – you might say [bõz] rather than [bonz] for bones, for instance.

The other difference is length. You can hold a vowel sound for a longer or shorter period of time. This is important in languages such as Finnish and Hindi. Contrary to what “everyone knows,” we don’t have an actual length distinction in English. We do not actually have long and short versions of vowels. We just have a distinction that we call long versus short. Read “The long and short of it,” next, for the low-down and dirty.

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frisky

Posted on January 16, 2013 | 3 comments

Visual: A short word, six letters, but with some vertical. It has an overall trend from upper left, with the f ascender, through the lower r and s mixed with the dotted i and high k, to lower right on the y descender. It has verticals, a cross-bar, curves, a hump, a dot, and diagonals: nary a thing missing in its quick frolic through typographical shapes.

In the mouth: It launches with the erupting embouchure of [fr], which may have voicelessness spreading from the [f] onto the [r] to make a sound like a rocket or the “sending” sound in Mac Mail. The lips then pull back in two stages: neutral for the first vowel, then pulling back wider at the end – after the tongue has hissed off the tip with [s] and kicked off the back with [k]. If it’s a rocket, it’s one that quickly launches through stages and goes off out of sight almost before you see it.

Etymology: Frisky (adjective) comes from frisk (noun), which comes from frisk (verb), which comes from frisk (adjective, obsolete), which comes from… um, there are two possible options. One is that it’s from the Germanic root that gives us fresh (and modern German frisch, which means the same thing). The other is that it’s from Middle French frique ‘lively, smart’, which in turn comes from Germanic. Either way it’s from Germanic and has danced around rather a lot, including looping a full circle from frisk adjective to frisky adjective like a dog chasing its tail.

Collocations: Often you feel frisky or are feeling frisky (never mind groovy), and may be particularly frisky; if you are frisky you are also likely young and may be a pup or a colt or even a goat (but not so likely, it seems, a kid).

Overtones: The word starts with the frothy fresh [fr], which shows up in a variety of words, including a fair few that are well served by saliva spraying forth from the mouth: fracas, frappé, fraught, fray, frazzle, freak, fresh, friction, frizzy, frolic, frosh, frothy, and frustration, not to mention frith. It then sharpens that feeling (like adjusting the nozzle on a hose from spray to jet) with the risky, which also smacks of whisky, whisk, brisk, and perhaps mist and disk and maybe even crispy. And if you look you can see the sky.

And then there’s that other common sense of frisk, first seen in the late 1700s: to manually search someone’s person by going through their clothes etc. while they’re still wearing them. I suppose if you were to do a similar patdown on your paramour he or she might find it rather frisky. Anyway, it’s directly derived from the verb frisk meaning ‘frolic, be frisky’, at least as far as anyone can see. And it may lurk in the background when this word skips across the lawn of your mind.

Semantics: Picture a puppy, especially a Labrador puppy. A little ball of energy. Incessantly wanting to play. Frolicsome. Wagging the tail with the whole body. Jumping up, licking, barking, running around. Frisky. Almost too much to handle. But happy!

Of course, anything or anyone particularly playful can be “frisky.” But among humans, it seems especially to connote a particularly sexual inclination: for puppy love substitute concupiscence – but you can retain much of the other described behaviour, if in some respects figuratively.

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finicky

Posted on January 14, 2013 | Leave a comment

Visual: This word starts off with a pair of letters that some typographers are quite finicky about, fi. In order to keep the top of the f and the dot on the i from conflicting, many type faces will have a separate fi character, which has either a reduced f or an f that dots the i with its forelock. There follows a more ordinary assortment of vertical strokes and curves, but with a sudden departure to diagonals in the ky at the end, as though the person has gone completely snaky – no, that’s too sinuous; perhaps freaky.

In the mouth: There is a procession backwards in the mouth, from lips via tongue tip to velum, and from softer to harder, starting with that softest fricative [f], moving through a nice nasal [n], and hitting a crisp voiceless [k] at last. Each consonant is followed by a high front vowel, with the last one the highest and tightest. In short, the word draws back and tightens and hardens, like a person who has just touched something icky.

Etymology: Finicky is related to the verb finick and the noun and adjective finicking and the adjective finical. The apparent oldest of the set is finical, dating from the late 1500s; finicky doesn’t hit the scene until the early 1800s. Where did all this come from? A common but uncertain supposition is that it’s from fine plus ical as in cynical and ironical.

Collocations: I think first of ads about cats being finicky eaters, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English puts finicky eater(s) high on the list, just below finicky about. About what? Food, weather, being touched, what have you. Apparently fish are also seen as finicky. So, of course, are children. Some people and things are notoriously finicky.

Overtones: It’s hard not to suspect the sense and usage of the word are influenced by its echoes of panicky and picky and fickle and, of course, icky, and maybe even fink. Also, somewhere back in the mind, fidgety. One can picture going picnicking with a kid named Finnegan (or maybe Nicky) who picks at food and calls it icky and insists he will be sick unless he has a flawless pickle sandwich. At last you declare, “Must you be so fricking finicky!”

Semantics: The dictionary definition is really just the start, isn’t it? I think I’d sum it up in a nutshell as ‘excessively fastidious’. But when you say someone is finicky, there’s an air of perhaps feline daintiness about it, aided by the slightness suggested by the high front vowels, and even if the finickiness is not to do with food it won’t be long before you’re thinking of finicky eaters. You can picture someone picking at something before finally flicking it aside. Finicky makes fussy sound messy.

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One of the best poem

Posted on January 14, 2013 | 1 comment

Here’s another poem from Songs of Love and Grammar, which I present today to fix in mind a problem construction often encountered.

The one

I’m dating a girl who likes moderation
but sometimes praises without reservation.
She has a cute way to show you your place:
she starts off partway, then slips you the ace.

I cooked her some dinner on our first date.
“That’s one of the best meal I ever ate!”
She said that. One best! A class of one!
Such flattery! And we’d just begun.

We went to a movie – the choice was clear:
“It’s one of the best film of the year,”
she said. “On that, the critics agree.”
(They’d all gone for this one? That’s news to me!)

As we walked back, the weather was just sublime:
“It’s one of the nicest night in quite a time.”
It was clear in all that she had to say
that she wanted to take things all the way.

At evening’s end, she gave me my throne:
“one of the best lover I’ve ever known.”
“Lover,” not “lovers” – now, how do you do:
on the list of the best, there’s no number two!

It looks like the matter is when, not whether,
we’ll be vowing to share the future together.
Her level of commitment is plain to see:
“You’re one of the only guy for me.”

This one is similar to the false concord issue, and it’s a very common
thing to see. The analytically “correct” way to put something like this – and the way that seems more natural to at least some of us – is to say, for instance, one of the best lovers. That is, there’s a set of people who are the best lovers, and the person in question is one of them. And, indeed, even people who would say or write one of the best lover would, I think, write one of them rather than one of him for short. But because the subject of the sentence is singular, and we have one as well, there’s a certain magnetism of singularity, shall we say. The speaker stays focused on the one person and uses one of the best as though it were a one-of-the-best or a top-quality to modify lover. Frankly, I’d still rather use the plural there – it just makes more sense to me.

Not that many of us are necessarily all that used to hearing the phrase in the
first place.

Make sure to visit Lulu.com to buy Songs of Love and Grammar for the word nerds in your life!

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A Word Taster’s Companion: Horseshoes, hand grenades… and phonemes

Posted on January 13, 2013 | 6 comments

Today: the fourth installment of my how-to guide for word tasting, A Word Taster’s Companion.

Horseshoes, hand grenades… and phonemes

They say close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades (and nuclear warfare). Well, there’s somewhere else it counts: phonemes.

As I explained in “The world speaks in harmony,” phonemes are target sounds that we get variously close to. To put it another way, they’re the sounds we think we’re saying.

Say Yeah really slowly, moving your tongue down and lowering your jaw gradually and smoothly. You have just moved quite smoothly through sounds with no sharp border between them, but though you can hear that, you will probably have a sense more of fading from one distinct sound to another than of moving through sounds that are not quite one or the other. This is because you unlearned all those intermediate sounds when you were first learning English, and you learned targets – phonemes – that you’re matching what you hear and say to.

Different languages have different sets of phonemes, and may draw different boundaries between the same phonemes. Think of your mouth as a big lot of land divided by fences into smaller parts. Everyone has the same size and shape of lot, but different languages put the fences in different places. If you’re learning a different language, you have to learn new sound boundaries. For example, our vowels in beat and bit are fixed in our minds as two different sounds, but they register as the same phoneme to speakers of Spanish, Russian, and quite a few other languages. They don’t have the fence between those two sounds that we have.

The same goes with consonants. For instance, several South Asian languages have a distinction between aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops. We make both kinds of sounds in English, but most of us don’t even notice – consciously – that we do. Put your hand just a short distance in front of your mouth. Say spit (don’t spit it, say it). Now say pit. Did you feel a puff of air on the p in pit? We aspirate /p/ when it’s the first consonant in a word but not when it’s the second – in other words, as linguists would write it, the phoneme /p/ is realized as the phones [p] and [ph] in different contexts. In Hindi and Thai, both versions of the sound are used in the same contexts and they’re considered as different as, for instance, b and p. On the other hand, in some languages, such as Spanish, /p/ is never aspirated – one of the factors that make a Spanish accent sound different from a standard Anglophone one.

Of course, there are different accents within a language, too. English has a large number of dialects, each with its own accent. Not everyone can learn to produce the accent of a different dialect, but most of us can get used to hearing the sounds done differently. Try saying (or imagining) the sentence “That’s a rather good bit of tea” in as many accents as you can imitate: east coast US, southern US, upper-crust British, working-class British, versions of Scottish and Irish, whatever else you want to try. Some sounds will vary quite a bit – compare them word by word. And yet somehow, because you know what the targets are in those accents for those phonemes in those contexts, you can understand it.

There are some snags, of course. If we hear rather in another accent there aren’t any other words it could be mistaken for – if a South African sounds like he’s saying “retha” we can mentally adjust the targets to fit it to the expected phonemes without wondering if he was saying something else. But when there are other things the word could sound like, confusion may ensue. A woman named Anne from Buffalo may risk having her name written down as Ian by someone from elsewhere hearing it over the phone. For that matter, if the sound is too different from what we expect, we may not recognize it even if there aren’t alternatives. One time when I was working in a bookstore a British bloke asked for the “hudda” section. At first I couldn’t at all understand what he wanted. He was looking for the horror section, as it turned out.

There is also the issue that we don’t all have exactly the same set of phonemes, even among English speakers. Get people from different places in Canada, the US, and England to say cot, caught, court, and you will find that most Canadians say the first two the same, most Brits (the r-dropping ones at least) say the last two the same, and many Americans say all three differently. Canadian English has merged the two vowel phonemes we hear in cot and caught. The Brits use the same vowel phoneme for caught as for court, and in court the r is dropped.

By the way, the vowel Canadians and Americans use in court is different from the one in cot, but most Canadians and many Americans may think of it as the same vowel – the same phoneme, in other words. The key is that that sound is only used before /r/, and the other one is never used before /r/. They’re in what’s called complementary distribution, which doesn’t mean they’re being handed out for free (though they are). Since they’re different sounds but are thought of as the same sounds, they’re what are called allophones of the same phoneme.

By now you should have a clear sense that phonemes often have different allophones that we may not realize are different. And yet somehow we maintain those differences. You can even have an allophone difference in one dialect that other dialects don’t have, and the speakers of the dialect with the difference may not notice that there’s a difference – and yet still maintain the difference.

For one example, most Canadians say the vowel in ice a little higher than the one in eyes, while few other English speakers do the same, and even though Canadians think of the sounds as the same and may not be consciously aware of the difference, it nonetheless persists. Many Canadians also say the vowel in out different from the one in loud. As with eyes/ice, it’s because the consonant after is voiceless in one case and voiced in another. (I’ll get to consonants soon enough, don’t worry.) But that out vowel that sounds the same as the loud vowel to Canadians trespasses on the territory of a different phoneme for Americans: the vowel in loot. This is why Canadians can say out and hear out while Americans hear the same thing and hear it as oot: for them, it’s on a different phoneme’s turf – it’s on the other side of the fence.

It gets even better, though: we actually make an at least slightly different sound each time we say a given phoneme, even in the same word repeated. Linguists draw diagrams showing the entire area in which a phoneme is made at different times by a speaker or by speakers of a specific dialect, with dots on them like holes on a dart board. But we are still able to match the sounds to what they’re intended to be. (This is helped by the fact that the fences aren’t really so much fences as fuzzy boundaries – what you hear a sound as is affected by what sound you expect to hear.)

It’s like having hand grenades going off in your mouth. They may not hit their targets right on, but they get close enough.

Next: The vowel circle

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sensical

Posted on January 10, 2013 | 3 comments

The other day I was in a meeting discussing the layout of an individualizable report. We had done a template with part real content and part filler content (lorem ipsum, that sort of thing). Our client contact person indicated that the next version needed to be a more completely real-world example. “Then we need to have all the data be sensical?” our designer asked.

Well. I have to say I was quite gruntled by this usage. I know some people might think sensical annoyingly peccable, but I find the usage in context perfectly ept, and, honestly, a ruly and kempt use of the language. It’s hardly the first backformation ever to be seen in the language. (Backformation is when you derive a word from a longer word that appears to be a suffixed version of it but is not. The noun mentee is made from a posited ment root backformed from mentor, for instance.)

Why not use sensible rather than sensical? Because it doesn’t mean the same thing. By that, I don’t just mean that we weren’t saying the data could be sensed. Sensible has several meanings, but the closest one to what we were talking about would have been ‘exhibiting good sense’. But we weren’t saying that the data had to exhibit good sense, just that it had to make sense. As in not be nonsensical. It had to be coherent, but since lorem ipsum text coheres, and sensical data that displayed numbers that might be unlikely in the real world might seem incoherent but would still be sensical, we didn’t necessarily want the word coherent.

Yes, yes, “entia non sunt multiplicanda” and all that (that’s Occam’s Razor: basically, it means “don’t add unncessary stuff” or “go with the simplest reasonable explanation”). Why add words wantonly. But this isn’t science, this is language, and language is not just a dry means of communication, it’s a fun game and we use it to express ourselves and add nuances. If our designer had said “Then we need to have all the data be sensible?” that would have implied a higher bar being set. And obviously it would be unnecessarily inelegant for her to say “Then we need to have all the data not be nonsensical?” She chose the word that worked. She said it, we understood it, there you have it.

But has sensical existed as a word already? Is it used in earnest today? How do we come to have a nonsensical without a sensical?

The answer to the first question is “Of course.” Any obvious backformation will show up fairly readily in usage, along with people asking “Is this a word?” The Oxford English Dictionary has citations for sensical from 1797 and 1839. (Nonsensical was in print by 1645.) However, the OED marks the word as obsolete and rare (it has the dreaded obelisk on the entry, gazing balefully like a basilisk – or rather hanging like the sword of Damocles over the headword).

And indeed sensical is not often used. It is used, however. Google it. Admittedly, you will find at the top of the results a number of wiki dictionary entries and several forum discussions of whether it’s a word. (I recommend this one on Vocaboly.com for some entertainment value.) Well, of course it’s a word. What a silly question. They use it, you understand it. No act of parliament or congress is required, nor any lexicographer’s imprimatur.

As to the etymology, the word nonsensical was formed by adding the suffix ical to the word nonsense (which of course was in turn formed from non and sense). There are a few other adjectives ending in ical that are formed from roots not ending in ic, such as canonical and chirurgical. By the time nonsensical came around, the sense of sensible meaning ‘making good sense’ was well established (and the older senses of ‘able to be sensed’ and ‘able to sense’ have been around since at least the 1300s), so that seemed generally to serve the turn – the finer distinction I make above was just not needed, I guess. And why not nonsensible? There actually is such a word, but it dates only to the 1800s and means ‘not available to the senses’. It happens that the more appropriate suffix for nonsense is ical, as in electrical, magical, musical, radical, and canonical.

I would be incomplete in my mission if I did not also point out that sensical ricochets off the back of the mouth rather than bouncing off the lips like sensible, lacks the many accreted flavours of sensible, and has nice echoes of all those ical words I mention above plus such as icicle, trickle, tickle, and such like. And it may carry that certain raciness or edginess that one gets from backforming an almost-unheard word from a common word, a thrill you may experience much more intensely from the curiously sensical little story “How I Met My Wife” by Jack Winter.

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A Word Taster’s Companion: The world speaks in harmony

Posted on January 9, 2013 | 5 comments

Today: the third installment of my how-to guide for word tasting, A Word Taster’s Companion.

The world speaks in harmony

It’s our ability to parse the flow of sound into separate sounds that makes language work. We have a conceptual understanding of the different sounds we make – ideal sounds, targets that we aim for and come variously close to when we actually speak. When the sounds are strung together, we still think of them as independent units. It’s like handwriting: the letters may flow together so you can’t say exactly where one ends and the next one starts, but you can see the different letters.

Now, when we hear someone talking, how do we know what different movements their mouth is making, what targets they’re shooting for? It’s all to do with the harmonics.

When you make a vocalization, your vocal cords are vibrating at a certain frequency – which, if you’re singing, is the note you’re singing – but they’re also echoing in your vocal tract at various frequencies that are multiples of the base frequency (two, three, four or more waves for every one of the base frequency). If you sing an A at 440 Hertz (vibrations per second), there are also echoes of that at, for instance, 880 Hertz and 1760 Hertz, among others.

Now, which harmonics sound louder and which sound quieter will be determined by the shape of the resonating space in your mouth. There’s a resonating space at the back of your mouth, from your larynx to the top of your tongue, and the higher your tongue is, the longer that space and the lower the frequency of the harmonics that stand out. There’s also a space between the front of your mouth and the closest point your tongue comes to your palate, and the smaller that space is, the higher the resonance. The stand-out harmonics those spaces engender are called formants: the one at the back is the first formant, and the one at the front is the second formant. (There are third and fourth formants that play smaller roles.)

Thus, [u] – “oo” as in “boot” – is heard as it is because it has lower harmonics coming out in both formants: the back of the tongue is high, making a big space between it and the larynx, and it’s also far back, making a big space between it and the front of the mouth. On the other hand, [æ] – “a” as in “cat” – is heard as it is because both formants are higher; the tongue is low and towards the front. And [i] – “ee” as in “beet” – has low resonances in the first set, and higher ones in the second set. The second set are always at least a little higher than the first, even when saying the low back vowel [a], as in “bother.”

We also recognize consonants this way. If they’re consonants that stop the flow of air, we recognize them by what the tongue is doing immediately before and after. If they let just a little air through, we also get the sound of the air as it hisses or buzzes. I’ll go into close-up details of the vowels and consonants in coming chapters.

So we hear these sounds, and we have a sense of where in the mouth they’re coming from, and we also have an idea of what sound could come next in any given word – by the time you’re a couple of sounds into a word, the possibilities are narrowed down quite a bit. We can also hear the effect of the tongue moving and changing the shape of the resonating space in the mouth. And we have learned a repertory of different sounds that we recognize as distinct speech sounds (I won’t say “letters”; those are what we write to represent the sounds). The actual sounds won’t always be exactly identical, but as long as they’re close enough to a target, an identifiable known speech sound, they will be identified as it, especially if the sounds around it lead us to expect it.

These target sounds – sounds that we recognize as separate speech sounds – are called phonemes. If you meet someone who speaks another language who can’t manage to differentiate “bit” from “beat,” that’s because their native language doesn’t have a distinction between those two vowel sounds, so they’re not used to making the distinction when speaking. They may even believe they can’t. They might have a heck of a hard time telling them apart when listening, too, because they both land close enough to the same target in the set of sounds they’re used to. It’s the same with English speakers hearing and making sounds from some other languages: we may not be able to tell apart sounds that, to the language’s native speakers, are obviously different. After all, learning language is also a process of unlearning: in order to have separate sounds, you not only have to treat similar sounds as completely different; you also have to forget that some sounds are different because you need to treat them as the same in order for your language to make sense.

Next: Horseshoes, hand grenades… and phonemes

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Hyphe-nation? Hyphen-ation?

Posted on January 9, 2013 | 1 comment

Several years ago I was working on a newsletter that had French and English versions. Our client contact spoke English but was a native Francophone. She complained that the hyphenation in the English was wrong.

Now, I was laying this newsletter out in InDesign, using its automatic hyphenation. It has a thorough hyphenation dictionary. I am a very, very fluent native Anglophone. I knew the hyphenation was right. But she was quite certain that it was not.

What did she think was wrong with it? Well, you see, it’s this: not everyone who speaks English realizes it, but we, like the French and speakers of many other languages, will as a habit say a consonant at the beginning of a syllable rather than at the end of the previous one if we can. For instance, we actually say the word breaking as [bɹe kɪŋ] (like “bray king”). Of course, there are some consonant pairs we won’t put together at the start of a syllable; we don’t say “da-mnation,” for example. Now, as it happens, in French, hyphenation occurs between syllables as they are actually said. By this rule, you would hyphenate at brea-king. That’s what she wanted

Does that look a little off? Would you say it should be break-ing? You’d be right.

In English, we have two different ways of hyphenating. In the British style, we aim to break at morpheme boundaries. What that means is that if a word is made up of a root and some prefixes and/or suffixes, you break at the boundary between the parts. So when you have break plus ing you break between them. And when you have hyphen plus ation you break it as hyphen-ation even though you actually say it like hyphe-nation.

We break those two words the same by the American system, but for a different reason. There is another very important fact in English that affects not just how we hyphenate words but how we read them and think of them generally. When you read a word, the quality of the vowel can be affected by the consonants, if any, that come after it – so we break at bus-ing rather than bu-sing – and the quality of a consonant can be affected by the vowels or consonants that come after it, so we will hyphenate Angli-cism rather than Anglic-ism because that c would look like a [k] sound. The American approach aims to make sure that when you read the first part of a word before the line break, you don’t have to rethink it once you see the second part. So it has to look as though it sounds like it actually does sound.

We just don’t write words exactly as they sound. English spelling is so perverse as to be almost ideographic at times. We have to recognize whole syllables or even whole morphemes, like break and breaking (as opposed to bread and breading, for instance – you only know what the vowel sound is when you see the letter after it). This results in some further traditions that couldn’t possibly make any sense from a strictly phonetic perspective.

Take a word like hotter. We actually say it with the /t/ at the beginning of the second syllable. But we have to think of the first syllable as ending with a consonant. If we spelled it as hoter, that would mean the syllables were ho ter, and that would make the o into a “long” o. So we write it with a double t to make it clear that the first syllable is a closed syllable, meaning its vowel is “short” – even though the syllable isn’t actually closed when you say it. It’s how you think you’re saying it that matters. Welcome to the wonderful world of phonemics!

But we also don’t break it as hott-er. As everyone learns in elementary school, we split it between the double letters: hot-ter. Never mind that there is no second [t] sound; that extra t isn’t part of the first syllable. But it’s not that we always break up consonant letters when the second one is unspoken: it’s dumb-er and smack-ing, not dum-ber (which could read as though you say the [b]) and smac-king.

There’s actually a little more to all this even than what I’ve already said. A favourite “gotcha!” in intro linguistics courses is to ask students where the syllable break is in Christmas. Now, we know right away that we don’t actually say a [t] in there. But we also know it’s a compound with a clearly identifiable first part, Christ, and we know that we would never start a syllable with [stm], so not only would we always hyphenate it as Christ-mas, it just makes sense that we must actually be breaking the syllable right before the [m]. Otherwise the i might stand for a different sound, as it would in an open syllable.

But nope! Gotcha, says the professor: the real break is [krɪ sməs] – that is, “Chri-s’mas.”

Except… Try this. Shout “Clover!” emphasizing each syllable, as though to a person hard of hearing and some distance away or in a noisy club. You hear what you do: “Clo! Ver!” OK, now try “Christmas!”

Is it “Chris! Mas!” or is it “Chri! Smas!”? Or is it more like “Chri! ss, Mas!”? Your results may vary, but for at least some people the [s] will fall squarely in the middle, a phenomenon called ambisyllabicity – something not all linguists agree exists. Try some other words such as breaking and dumber and hotter and see where you put the consonant in the middle. The natural tendency is for it to attach to the following syllable, but we think of it as part of the previous syllable, and it affects how we pronounce the word too, so it may not entirely let go of the previous syllable.

In English, we just don’t read one letter at a time. We just can’t! Consider the effect of breaking according to when we actually start saying the next syllable, separating vowels or consonants from the consonants that affect them:

En-
glish

sy-
llable

mi-
ddle

ho-
pping

assi-
stant

ma-
king

ma-
sking

regre-
ttable

and so on.

How did I resolve the issue with the newsletter? I just turned off hyphenation, which made the right edge of the text more ragged (don’t do it if you have full-justified text, especially in narrow columns) but quite readable and not susceptible to imposition of inappropriate hyphenation standards.

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rife

Posted on January 9, 2013 | Leave a comment

Word country is rife. It is rife with the usual things, of course: speculation, rumours, problems, conflicts, and even corruption. Such strife! If something is rife with something else, that something else is simply expected to be negative. It is like a loaded rifle, this word, and with is the charge and the word that follows is the bullet.

But this rife gun may also bear flowers. And so it does in word country. Here it is also rife with life, each stream teeming, each river ripe with fish and flora. Words may reproduce like cells: each one, when riven, arrives as a pair, making multitude, a flow and a flood. Is this a corruption of the language? If so, we are rife with it, but is that a bad thing? Let sense effloresce. Somewhere in the rough, forgotten past, a split happened in a word and one branch went on through Latin to become river and arrive and kin, and another went by way of Germanic words to become a word that split to be the dividing word rive, best known now in its riven form, and rife, a word for multiplicity and prevalence.

Multiplicity and prevalence that has, over the centuries, leaned towards the sour flavour, the sound of strife and rifle more than of ripe and life and wife and rice; we seldom – though not never – now see such assemblages as rife with beauty or hope was rife that… The sense has split again, and one stream is the stronger.

As words and senses may divide, so too may sounds. In the word country of Canada, there is one more thing dividing rife and rive: the vowel sound is different. Oh, it is the same phoneme, it stands for the same thing, but Canadians start the /aɪ/ diphthong higher before voiceless consonants: “uh” rather than “ah”, [ɹəɪf] against [ɹaɪv]. Thus it is riven and we are ever more rife with sounds in the river of our language.

But what comes may go. Time will not reverse any more than a river may, but differences can disappear and words and sounds may merge, dissolving conflicts and creating problems. What is rife may yet see itself undone in fire. When will that happen, and how, and where? Speculation and rumours are rife. But you will not know until the time is ripe.

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