Category Archives: language and linguistics

A Word Taster’s Companion: The long and short of it

Posted on January 20, 2013 | 2 comments

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

The long and short of it

There’s something you should know about long and short vowel pairs in English.

They’re not.

Oh, the short vowels are short. And they’re even slightly shorter before voiceless stops than before voiced ones (the [æ] in mat is a bit shorter than the one in mad, for instance).

And the long ones are longer. But not because they’re long versions of the short ones. “Long i” is not actually a long version of “short i,” nor is “long o” an extended version of “short o.” “Long a” doesn’t have any of the sound of “short a” in it at all. Same goes for “long” and “short” e. And u? Even worse.

Let me show you what I mean. Pretend you’re at the doctor and say “ah.” Say it quickly first. There’s your short a. OK, now say “aahhhh,” nice and long. There’s your long a: a long version of a short a. But it’s not your “long a” at all. You know what “long a” is: the sound in fate. But if it were really a long version of “short a,” you would say that word like “faat.”

So why don’t we do that?

Well, we used to. Then something changed.

English “long” vowels actually were long versions of the short ones centuries ago. But accents change over time, pronunciation of phonemes shifts, and there was a big change during the 15th and 16th centuries, a thing called the Great Vowel Shift. The long vowels all moved up in the mouth while the short ones stayed put. The vowels at the top couldn’t move any further up, so they became diphthongs starting lower in the mouth and moving up.

So the word we used to say as “baat” is the word bate. The word we used to say as “bate” is the word beet. The word we used to say as “beet” is the word bite.

Meanwhile, things went even nuttier in the back. The word we used to say like “boat” is the word boot (hence the oo spelling) and the word we used to say like “boot” is the word bout. But what we call “long o” is really the shifted version of a long version of the sound in bought. What we call “long u” is another thing that happened to that vowel: the sound we used to say as in “booty” is the sound in beauty.

Does that seem stupid? Consider that in some versions of English (much Canadian English, for instance), the word stupid – which because of the vowel shift became like “styoopid” – is now back to a pre-shifted “stoopid.”

Meanwhile, the short vowels pretty much stayed put, resulting in these mismatched socks. Watch the zigzag your tongue makes as you say the vowels in bat, bait, bet, beet, bit, bite, in order. You might find it clearer if you say just the vowels and leave off the [b] and [t]. Now try them in the order of bat, bet, bit; bait, beet, bite.

Congratulations. You’ve had your tongue for how long? And you may just be getting to know its ways better now.

But why would this happen? Does it seem too strange for words? Well, in fact, changes to pronunciation keep on happening, everywhere, all the time. A language never stops changing as long as it’s in active use by people who speak it as their first language. The Great Vowel Shift is just the best-known vowel shift. There’s one in the United States called the Northern Cities shift that is in progress now and is responsible for the raised and fronted “short” vowels you hear from Buffalonians and others on and near the Great Lakes (why Ann can sound like “Ian” and gone can sound like “gan” to people from elsewhere). Think, too, about how people from the southern US often say their vowels – they’re different from the way Northerners say them even though way, way back in the mists of time all English speakers said them about the same way. Think about the “Canadian raising” I talked about in “Horseshoes, hand grenades… and phonemes”: eyes versus ice, loud versus lout.

And listen around for some other changes that might be more evident in some groups of the population than others (younger people, for instance) – such as a lowering that makes test sound more like “tast.” Listen for changes to consonants too, and differences between different speakers. The one constant in language is change. And sometimes that change can get pretty weird.

Next: on to consonants.

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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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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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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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A Word Taster’s Companion: What makes a word

Posted on January 7, 2013 | 1 comment

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

What makes a word

Let us start by looking at the parts of words. Take a word. In fact, let’s start with start. Here’s a simple question: what is this word, start, made of?

Did someone say five letters?

Oops.

No, words are not made of letters.

That’s right: one of the first things just about anyone knows about words is the first thing they’re going to have to unlearn.

Tell me, what did you do first, when you were a very small child: write or speak?

You almost certainly learned to speak a few years before you learned to write. You knew the sounds long before you knew the symbols used to represent them on paper.

But aren’t those sounds letters?

They sure aren’t. Letters came along to represent sounds many thousands of years after humans started speaking. And anyone who can write English knows that the same letter is often used to represent several different sounds – for instance, fat, make, above – and the same sound can be represented by different letters – hay, hey, weigh.

Words are made up of quite a few different things, actually – and we’ll get to them all by the time I’m done with you – but on the most basic level of expressive form, words are made up of sounds (unless you are deaf and speak sign language).

And those sounds are made by the physical movements of your vocal tract. (If you speak sign language, they’re made up of movements of your hands and other body parts.) So when you say a word, you feel it. And when you hear a word, you know what it feels like.

So feel it. Feel this word: “Start.” Say it.

What do you feel your tongue doing? First the tip is up near the front of your mouth, behind the teeth and ahead of the ridge (that ridge is called the alveolar ridge). It’s letting some air through, making a hissing noise. Your voice is not activated: you could only whisper, not sing, while saying [s].

Then your tongue closes off the airflow. For a moment no air gets out of your mouth, because your nose is closed too (by means of a flap at the back of your mouth). Then you release it, and the tongue drops down and sits flat on the bottom of your mouth, and your voice starts up: [a].

Then, if you’re among those who say the [r], the tongue humps up like a cat stretching. It makes a narrower passage between itself and the roof of your mouth (your palate).

Finally, the tip of the tongue touches again and blocks the airflow as the voice stops – but you may find that even before the tongue gets all the way there the airflow has stopped; many people will make this stop using the closing point in the throat, the glottis, which is what you use to stop the air when you swallow or hold your breath.

So there you have it. One continuous movement of the tongue, with the voice engaged just in the middle. A continuous flow of physical movement and a continuous flow of sound. But we hear it as five sounds, because we have learned to divide the sound stream we hear into those sounds.

Next: The world speaks in harmony

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definite, definitely

Posted on January 6, 2013 | 2 comments

This is definately a word that’s going to set a lot of people off. Definetly. Defiantly.

(Nails digging into your palms yet?)

I grew up with video games like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Centipede… They all have an important thing in common with English spelling: They’re all games where you will lose eventually. The point is not to win but just to last as long as you can before you make a mistake …and get slaughtered for it.

Some people last longer than others.

But at least people don’t think you’re a moron if you get wiped out quickly at Pac-Man.

It is true that good spelling in English is typically a sign of a decent intellect and a good education. The converse is not as reliably true. There are many people who are very intelligent and very strong in fields such as math or engineering who are not all that great at English spelling. And of course there are many people who simply were not really taught spelling very well in school and did not take it upon themselves to correct the deficiency because it did not appear all that important to them at the time.

The aim of writing is to represent spoken words. Alphabetic writing systems operate on a generally phonetic principle. Some languages are better than others at sticking to that principle. English has become spectacularly awful at it, in part due to borrowing words from other languages (sorry, not borrowing, stealing; we never give them back), in part due to sound changes in English that were not reflected in spelling changes, in part due to prescriptive spelling trends that actually deprecated adherence to phonetics. Read all about it at “What’s up with English spelling?”

So we come to today’s word. It’s a very frequently misspelled word. In some contexts (e.g., some online forums) I think I see definately more often than definitely. Spellings also seen include definatly, definantly, definetly, definently, and even defiantly (let’s just grab some letters and put them there in a plausible arrangement, shall we?). It persists defiantly! And almost infinitely.

There is a reason for this obstinate intrusion of this immaculately conceived a into the word. It is analogy. There are so many words ending in an /ət/ (and, by extension, /ətli/) – realized in various contexts as [ɛt] and [ɪt] – including some very popular words (chocolate, anyone?), that the ate(ly) spelling just seems right. And if you see others doing it, it reinforces it.

So why don’t we spell it that way? Other languages spell things as they sound, regardless of where they came from, after all. For instance, the French loan word chauffeur becomes sjofør in Norwegian, which is a perfectly phonetic spelling for them.

Well, we don’t do that in English. We’re more likely to change our pronunciation to match the spelling, in fact. We like to keep words spelled the way they came into the language. Not always always – sometimes we’ve made them even fancier, and sometimes we’ve trimmed them down – but especially lately it’s the thing to do.

So what put the i in definite? It might help to understand if I define it. What does definite mean, anyway? ‘Certain. Precise. Clearly defined.’ Clearly defined? Indeed. Given clear finite boundaries. From Latin definitus, from de plus finire ‘finish, end, bound’. The word that gives us finish and finite and infinite and definition gives us definite.

But the meaning has shifted just enough, and the pronunciation has reduced just enough on that last syllable, that the connection to those other words is not at the front of the mind, and sometimes not at the back of it either. We don’t, after all, say it like “dee finite”; we say it more like “deaf, innit” – or, to be precise, as /dɛf ə nət/, with those /ə/ phonemes varying in actual pronunciation, but the syllable boundaries quite certain. The common abbreviation for definite is def, as in “I would def go there.” It sometimes seems as though our phonology is increasingly deaf, innit?

But as indefinite as the spelling may be in the minds of many, the response by some to the misspelling is very definite. Oh, definitely. D-E-F-I-N-I-T-E-L-Y, as the website says.

Well, so be it. When it rains it pours. And it is definitely raining.

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voice

Posted on December 13, 2012 | Leave a comment

I always enjoy the beginning of a word tasting course. All those new faces – some eager, some dragged there by their girlfriends or significant others – ready for what they hope will be an enjoyable experience but, at the very least, will leave them somehow more cultured.

Of course you get all sorts. People who have retired and now have the time to enjoy words. Young couples, the guy nearly always trying to impress the girl with what he knows about words, even if he seems only to know things that aren’t so (“Oh, no, no one likes adverbs anymore…” “There was a fashion for Scandinavian loans a while ago, but it’s East Asian ones that are pretty much where it’s at now…” “Yes, you see, you know it’s voiceless because it’s spelled with an s. A z means it’s voiced.”). Businessmen who get exposed to some pretty expensive words while out with clients but who never really get to appreciate them, now wanting to learn how to really enjoy them. Groups of women who couldn’t persuade their associated males to come – or didn’t want them to anyway.

I like to start them off with a few words right off the bat, just to have a sense of what level they’re all at and to give them a starting point. I’ll give them words they probably haven’t heard before and ask them to write down what the words make them think of, what they feel like to say. I insist that they write down the first ten things they think of. Of course the results often begin to sound a bit like a psychotherapy session.

Then, having made words a little strange, I give them some words they know quite well. I like the reactions to dog and then hound. Eyes begin to open: what different tastes, feelings, and images for words with pretty much the same objects. I used to use cat and pussy, but some of the responses were sometimes a bit much for some of those present to take graciously.

Then we dive into the exploration of the basic sound-generating organism of the body. I usually start with the voiced/voiceless distinction. This can sometimes be surprisingly unfamiliar. It can also be an occasion for some good partner work for those who have come with others, as in the case of one young lady who was in the class with her boyfriend and didn’t quite cotton to it.

“I don’t get what you mean,” she protested. “Every time I speak I’m using my voice.”

“Every time you speak you’re using your vocal tract, but your voice turns on and off.”

“If my voice was off you couldn’t hear me.”

“Say your name,” I said.

“Why?”

“Or anything. Just say a word.”

“Malcolm.” She made a sideways glance at her boyfriend.

“Now whisper it.”

She leaned up to him, cupped her hands around his ear, and whispered it into his ear. I think she licked his ear slightly, too, but her hands were in the way.

“Whisper it in this direction, loudly enough that I can hear it,” I suggested.

“Malcolm,” she obligingly whispered, reasonably loudly.

“OK, great. You whispered it. You weren’t using your voice, but I could hear it.”

“Of course I was using my voice! I was using my whispering voice!” she insisted.

“Which isn’t actually voice, because your vocal cords don’t vibrate.”

“Well, I know what my English teacher, Ms. Van Tilt, said. ‘Use your whispering voice.’”

I sighed. There are a lot of unfortunate things that get said in English classes.

“She should have been… more careful in her choice of words. If you have laryngitis, you lose your voice, right?”

“Well, yeah, but that’s just a figure of speech.”

“Actually, it’s the same use of the word voice. The technical use.” Technical usually seals it. And of course her boyfriend was forced to nod sagely. Guys always want to seem like they know something if it’s technical. “If your vocal cords are vibrating – your voice box – then a sound is voiced. If they’re not, it’s unvoiced. Put your hand on your neck and say missing slowly.” I demonstrated.

She tried. “Mmmiiiiisssssssiiiiinnnggg.”

“You feel how it’s not vibrating during the s, the ‘ssss’?” I turned to the rest of the class. “Everybody try this. Try a few words. Try some of the ones we started with.” They obliged. The air was filled with slowly echoing words, people speaking slowly with their hands on their throats – like a scene from some sci-fi movie (“Time… warp… losing… air…”).

The girl’s boyfriend, Malcolm, took this occasion to improve their partner work. “You can also feel it in the chest,” he said, putting his hand on her chest. She said “Shampoo.”

“Wait,” he said, “your shirt is damping the vibration.” He worked his hand underneath it.

“Thixotropic,” she said, and smiled. “Woo!”

I tried not to roll my eyes. “Yes, quite a lot of your body resonates with sound. That’s what helps produce the sound quality. You’ll feel it on the top of your head, too.”

Malcolm grabbed her butt. “Say it now.”

“Hey,” she said, smiling, and smacked his hand.

“It doesn’t usually make it all the way down there,” I said. “Unless you’re an opera singer.”

I moved on to the shape of the vocal tract. I showed the class the diagram of the mouth and started talking about the parts. I always encourage people to explore the insides of their mouths with their tongues.

I hadn’t really thought of this part as so much of an occasion for partner work.

But as I had the class making as many different variants of /l/ as I could, sweeping their tongues back and forth over their palates, I turned and saw Malcolm and the girl playing championship tonsil hockey.

“Now, I know that words are stimulating and can be romantic…” I said.

“Oh,” she said, pulling away, “sorry, we were just curious whether we could make sounds with each other’s tongues. Like, my tongue in his mouth. And vice versa.”

She was looking like an altogether more promising student than I had first anticipated. I glanced around the class. “Try it at home,” I said. “And report back.”

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The madder matter of t’s and d’s

Posted on November 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

One of the most common “have you ever noticed” things people like to make mention of in English pronunciation – especially North American English pronunciation – is how, in many words, such as matter and betting, “we say ‘t’ as ‘d’.”

I put that in quotes because that’s what people say.

It’s not really true.

Actually, we say them both as a third sound. It just happens that this third sound, to our ears, sounds more like [d] than like [t]. (By the way: I’m using the linguistic standard of putting a sound in brackets, [t], if it’s the sound we’re actually making, and between slashes, /t/, if it’s the sound we believe ourselves to be making whether or not we actually are making exactly that sound. So “hit it” will always be /hɪt ɪt/ but not always [hɪt ɪt].)

Here, I’ll prove that we don’t say it as [d]. Say the following, slowly and carefully, perhaps as though you’re speaking to someone who is hard of hearing:

I’m not kidding about the reckless betting.

No problem making /t/ and /d/ different there, right?

Now say it quickly, as quickly as you reasonably can, maybe two or three times in a row.

Those d’s and t’s seem to be pretty much the same sound now, right? All d’s, perhaps?

No, not all d’s. Say this slowly and carefully, perhaps as to someone who is having a hard time hearing you:

I’m not kidding about the reckless bedding.

Before, when you said “reckless betting” quickly, there was no problem with a hearer knowing you were talking about gambling. But when you say the [d] clearly, that’s out the window; you’re now talking about crazy quilts and sheets. You can’t say “bedding” clearly and be taken for saying “betting” under normal circumstances.

We tend to think that we’re saying it as [d] because most of us don’t have a letter to associate with what we are saying it as. But I’ll tell you what we’re really saying it as: a thing linguists call a tap. The tongue just taps the alveolar ridge without really stopping the airflow. We sometimes make a flap, which is when the tongue taps on the way past rather than bouncing off. A tap is like in “better” (said quickly and casually); a flap is like in “editing” (said quickly and casually). The International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for a tap or a flap is [ɾ].

Does that look like a partly-formed r? As well it might. Some speakers – particularly those with accents we might think of as “proper” British – will use it for /r/ in the middle of words, as in “very horrifying.” North Americans, who aren’t used to saying /r/ that way, often represent this as a d as in “veddy British.” But it’s not [d]. It’s [ɾ].

Here’s how sounds work in language: Every language has a set of sounds that are considered to be distinctive – swap in a different one and you have a different word (or a non-existent word). These distinctive sounds are called phonemes. Do not confuse these with the letters of the alphabet. For instance, c is a letter that can stand for the phoneme /k/ as in can, /s/ as in ice, or even /tʃ/ in some loan words such as ciao. On the other hand, /k/ is a phoneme that can be represented by c as in can, k as in kill, ck as in kick, ch as in school, q as in question, even que as in unique.

But a sound that is considered to be distinctive may have several different ways of being produced, depending on where it shows up. We just happen to hear them all as versions of the same sound and thus interpret them all as the same sound by habit without generally noticing that there is any difference. Take /t/, for instance. Say the following words:

ting sting matting mattress mat mitten

Each one has a different version of that /t/. Linguists call these different versions phones (as if that word didn’t have enough meanings already). The system of phones is phonetics, while the system of phonemes is phonemics. (Phonics is not a word linguists use.)

Put your hand in front of your mouth and say “ting sting.” You might feel an extra puff of breath on “ting.” If you say “pill spill” you will feel much more of a puff on “pill.” We put those puffs on voiceless stops (/k, t, p/) when they’re at the very beginning of a syllable – but not if there’s /s/ before them at the start of the syllable. Those puffs are called aspiration.

That’s two of the six different variations on /t/ – what linguists call allophones of /t/. I’m sure you can hear the different allophones in “matting” (with the tap) and “mattress” (with “mattress” the /tr/ together sound like “ch” plus “r”). Now how about “mat”? The difference with that one is that we don’t release /t/ when there isn’t another vowel or liquid after it – we just hold it closed. Usually we just close our throat (glottal stop) and sometimes we don’t even entirely touch the tongue to the roof of the mouth. If you have /n/ after it, as in “mitten,” just the nasal passage releases, unless you’re speaking carefully or formally.

All of these are thought of as /t/. All of them are heard as /t/. But they really do differ. In some languages some of them are treated as distinct sounds. You know how speakers of some languages can’t say “beat” and “bit” differently? That’s because those two vowels are allophones – different phone realizations – of the same phoneme in those languages. Well, we’re like that with things like the difference between aspirated and unaspirated stops.

Why do we do this? Economy of effort. A /t/ is a voiceless alveolar stop. We don’t always retain all those characteristics of voice (voiceless), place (alveolar), and manner (stop); we’ll stick with whichever is sufficient to make the sound recognizable while not having to make too much effort to say it, and sometimes we’ll add a little more distinction where needed. So at the start of a word, we add that puff of air to make it clearer that it’s not /d/. We don’t need to do that after /s/ because we never say /sd/ at the start of a word. In the middle of a word like matter, we just keep the place and a similar manner, but we don’t stick too closely to the voicelessness or the hard stop. At the end, as in “mat,” or before a nasal, as in “mitten,” we reduce it to a different stop (glottal) that takes less effort to say. That’s also what some people (notably some British people) do when they use a glottal stop between two vowels, as though “matter” were “ma’er” (or “ma’ah”). The quality of being a voiceless stop is enough; the other two voiceless stops (/k, p/) don’t reduce to a glottal stop in English.

So those are the allophones of /t/. What you need to know is that sometimes two different phonemes have, in some contexts, the same phone as an allophone. Most “short” vowels in English reduce to a neutral unstressed vowel [ə], for instance. The case in point today is [ɾ], which can be a version of /t/ or /d/ (or, in some kinds of English, /r/).

We think of voice as the difference between /t/ and /d/. But they’re stops – how do you voice a consonant when your air flow is stopped? You don’t, really. You know the difference between /t/ and /d/ mainly by how the sounds before and after behave. Say this:

mad mat

In “mad” your voice keeps going right up until you say the [d], but in “mat” you cut off a moment sooner. You also say the vowel a bit shorter.

Now say this:

The madder matter

The difference is very subtle, isn’t it? But you may say the [æ] before the /d/ a little longer than before the /t/, and you may cut the voice out just a little for the /t/ version. It’s not really enough to be sure about when you’re listening, but there may be that small effect of the sound you’re thinking about when you say it.

On the other hand, you might really say them both the same way.

It just happens that that way will not be with [d]. It will be with [ɾ].

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