For my graduate phonetics class, I was asked to phonetically transcribe a poem using the IPA. The poem given was called “The Chaos”, by Gerard Nolst Trenité. It’s a rhyming poem in the English language written to show off some of the most interesting spelling irregularities in the English language.

The assignment itself was just a great deal of transcription, but the wonderful bonus to it all was finally seeing a poem rhyme.

English spelling isn’t terribly phonetic, to put it nicely. The same letter combinations can have the different pronunciations in different words (“gh” in “ghost” and “rough”), and only through years of teaching, spelling bees, and repetition are we able to finally figure out how to read things written in our own alphabet.

So, not surprisingly, unless you speak the language, it’s nearly impossible to detect a rhyme looking at the text of a poem alone. To illustrate that point, here are the first twelve verses of “The Chaos”, justified to the right to emphasize the endings of lines:
nightmareeng.gif

(My apologies to those using screenreaders for using a graphic to display text, but IPA fonts and text formatting just don’t work well on websites)

If you read the poem aloud, the rhyme is obvious. Just looking at the text, though, there’s really no hint of the rhyme excepting the final letter, and rhyme is more than just final letters. “Sound” and “Wound” (injury) don’t rhyme (in the simple sense), even though every letter but the first is identical. Bough and flow share only one letter, yet they rhyme wonderfully in English.

In the English language, our writing system isn’t remotely phonetic. In order to detect rhyme, we have to hear something read (either aloud or in our heads). However, in a phonetic writing system, something truly wonderful happens.

Here are the same twelve verses transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet:

nightmareipa.gif

Even if you can’t read the IPA, you can see the words rhyming. Because the IPA transcribes sounds, we can see when the lines end in the exact same sounds. If the final vowel and consonant(s) are the same in the IPA, then it rhymes. It’s that simple.

Literate English speakers have a great deal of training throughout their lives dedicated to making heads or tails of our bizarre writing system. We sometimes even forget how strange it is, and we stop looking for exact correspondences to sound and rhyme.

English readers seldom see that spelling’s chains won’t let us be. We speak aloud inside our heads, we forget our long past reading dreads. The spelling bees all left behind, phonics beaten through our minds. The system seems easy, perhaps, sublime, but alas, we’ve never seen a rhyme.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Usage, Phonetics and Phonology, Words, Phrases, and Idioms | 3 Comments


Today, I’d like to talk about a sound that most English speakers don’t notice even though we use it every day: The Glottal Stop

The Glottal Stop is a unique consonant present in many languages around the world. It’s often represented as a lone ‘ (as in “Hawai’i”) or as a question mark (?), but its official IPA symbol looks like this:

glottalstop.gif

What do Mittens and Hawaii have in common?

Let’s look at the name of the state of Hawaii. The “proper” (native) pronunciation of the state’s name is “huh-WHY-ee”, rather than “huh-WHY” or “huh-WHYYY”.

Say the correct version slowly. The sort of “catch” in your throat between the “WHY” and the “ee” is our phonetic phriend, the glottal stop. In the IPA, Hawaii is written as (/həwaɪʔi:/), with the glottal stop showing up in all its glory.

Sometimes, you’ll see Hawaii written with an apostrophe in the place of the glottal stop (“Hawai’i”) to show that, but really, the glottal stop is unmarked 90% of the time in English.

Another place where the glottal stop makes an appearance in many dialects of English is in the words “mitten” or “button”. Say those words carefully, and you’ll notice that where we have a “tt”, there’s actually a glottal stop, not any sort of T sound. In the IPA, when I pronounce these words, they’re transcribed as /mɪʔn/ and /bʌʔn/ (with the n’s as their own syllables). Contrast this with “bitter” (which is actually an alveolar tap, not a t) or “mitts” (which has a true t), and you’ll see through the English writing system’s weave of deception.

You’ll also find this sound in expressions like “Uh-oh” and between many words (“new attack”). The glottal stop will also show up from time to time in English phrases replacing a t if you’re listening closely.

Whatcha gonna do with all those glottal stops, all those glottal stops inside your speech?

I’m mildly ashamed to use this as an example, but in the Black Eyed Peas song “My Humps”, the chorus is filled with glottal stops. I’ll transcribe (broadly) a bit of the chorus (from 00:13 in the above video on) below:

junk2.gif

Look at that transcription and try to note the different glottal stops in the singers speech. They’re going to make make make you surprised, make you surprised at how many glottal stops are in our everyday speech.

What’s our throat catching, anyways?

Take a look at this picture of the human vocal folds (courtesy of Wikipedia):
vocalfolds

Our glottis (the phonetic term for the vocal folds/vocal cords) is composed of two pieces of tissue that move together and apart during speech, and vibrate rapidly to create voicing. Those pieces of tissue can be moved a great deal, and even brought all the way together.

Hold your breath with your mouth and nose opened. You’ll feel a pressure build up below your throat, and you’ll probably be able to feel exactly where the air is stopped. That closure is the vocal folds, and what you’re doing now is holding a glottal stop. In order to make a glottal stop in speech, we just pull those two pieces of tissue all the way together until they make a seal, and then release it again. That’s it. No tongue, no voicing, no nasal worries. Just close the glottis. Easy, huh?

Glottal stops in other languages

Glottal stops are common in English, but they’re not really phonemic (meaning that they don’t generally contrast with other sounds). If I say “mitten” using a full on T, people will understand you, but just think you’re strange. They’re even more common in British English, and in some Cockney dialects, they’re really omnipresent (“then, la’er, my dau’er ‘it me”).

However, in other languages, they can carry a very distinct contrast. In Hawai’ian and Samoan, they’re phonemic, and can show up anywhere. /ʔika/ and /ika/ miɡht be entirely different words even though speakers of many languages can’t tell the difference. No matter how I’ve tried, I still can’t quite hear this difference. English speakers love our word-initial glottal stops (at the beginning of words), so I hear them most of the time, and have trouble starting a word without them.

Similarly, there are other languages where /kaʔ/ and /ka/ would be completely different. Once again, English speakers (and speakers of many other Indo-european languages) have lots of trouble with this contrast.

Reader, meet Glottal Stop

So, now that you know it’s out there, I suspect you’ll be hearing glottal stops in lots of places. Once you do, you and the glottal stop will certainly become phast phonetic phriends.

Tagged with Phonetic Phriends, Phonetics and Phonology | 11 Comments


Well, my trusty stats program has just informed me that I’ve now gotten over 10,000 unique hits on this site since it opened last July. w00t! Given that this is a one person Linguistics and language blog, that’s just awesome, and I’m really grateful for all the people that read my site and comment on posts.

Although I may write this site for my own enjoyment, another reward for writing all this comes from knowing people are reading and enjoying my work here. As always, feel free to share the site with a friend, with a social bookmarking site, or even using a link from your own page. Every little bit helps in getting the joys of Linguistics out to the masses.

So, thanks for reading, for commenting, for emailing and for linking, and here’s to another 10,000 people exposed to the wonders of language!

Tagged with Site News | 1 Comment

Read older posts »

All content © Linguistic Mystic 2006-2007 unless otherwise indicated.
Please contact me for permission to reprint or repost.

Site Information

Search all posts

Tags


Archives


Site features