Only yesterday, I briefly mentioned Mondegreens, where a song lyric is misheard as some other homophonous (identical-sounding) phrase (“killed him and laid him on the green” vs. “killed him and Lady Mondegreen”). This gave me cause to mention Jimi Hendrix’ “Purple Haze” and its famous Mondegreen. The original lyric is:

Purple haze all in my brain
Lately things just don’t seem the same
Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why
‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky

But many people hear the last line as “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy”, and that misperception actually reveals something very interesting about how English consonants work.

What makes /k/ different from /g/?

Both /k/ and /g/ are what linguists refer to as “stops”, they’re consonants where the airstream out of the mouth is completely obstructed, and actually, both /k/ and /g/ are “velar” stops, made with the tongue up against the soft palate, or velum. Try it, making a /k/ as in “cap” and a /g/ as in “gap”, one after the other, and you’ll notice that your tongue isn’t changing position when you switch from /k/ to /g/ at all.

The simplistic explanation is that /k/ is a voiceless sound (meaning that our vocal folds/cords aren’t vibrating while we make the closure), and /g/ is a voiced sound, involving glottal vibration during the closure. Unfortunately, like most things in phonetics, it’s not quite that simple or easy.

Voice Onset Time

In reality, stop consonants are classified by their voice onset time, the amount of time that elapses between when the stop is released (when the tongue stops blocking airflow) and when the voicing starts (when the vocal folds start vibrating) for the following vowel. By looking at voice onset time (VOT), we can actually classify consonants in three different ways. (I’ve actually discussed voice onset time before, but now that I’ve already made nicer looking graphics for teaching, it seems worth doing again.)

First, [kʰ]. In English, any voiceless stop that’s at the start of a syllable (so the /k/ in “cap”, but not “pack”) is “aspirated”, meaning that there’s a considerable time gap with a burst of air between the opening of the stop and the start of voicing (it has a positive voice onset time). In the word “cap” /kæp/, we bring our tongue back to the velum to make a closure, we release that closure, and then, around 100 ms (milliseconds) later, we start voicing for the vowel /æ/. Viewed in terms of the acoustical waveform of speech, here’s what aspiration and VOT looks like in [kʰa]:

[g], on the other hand, is a voiced stop, where voicing actually starts during the closure. So, the tongue moves up to the velum, the vocal folds begin vibrating, and then, when the stop is released, the vowel begins immediately. The voice onset time is negative, as the voicing started before the closure. See yet another waveform diagram below, this time showing /ga/:

There’s a third option. Imagine that you started voicing at the exact moment that you released the stop, as shown below:

Then what you have is [k], what linguists refer to as a “voiceless unaspirated stop”, with a voice onset time of 0 (or close to it).

So, we have three stop choices: Voiced stops, voiceless unaspirated stops, and voiceless aspirated stops, which are all used differently in the different languages of the world. But how does this affect Jimi Hendrix?

English makes stops oddly

Our problems with Jimi Hendrix kissing guys (not that there’s anything wrong with that) come from three fundamental oddities in the way that English produces stops.

First, English only distinguishes between Aspirated and Voiced stops. “cap” starts with a /k/, which is produced with aspiration, and “gap” starts with /g/. We don’t have a three way contrast between voiced [g], voiceless unaspirated [k], and voiceless aspirated [kʰ]. Korean, as I’ve mentioned before, has that three way contrast.

Second, English word-initial (at the start of a word) voiced stops are actually produced as voiceless-unaspirated stops, with a VOT of ~0. This is because we, as English speakers, have really strong aspiration in our voiceless stops, so even if we produce something without much voicing during the closure, listeners will still be able to understand that it’s not aspirated, so clearly, the speaker must be intending to express voicing. Here’s a waveform of the word “guy”, to prove the point. Note that there’s a very little VOT here.

Finally, when following an /s/, English voiceless stops are not aspirated. So, in the word “sky”, we have an unaspirated stop, rather than the normal, aspirated [kʰ] which our writing system would lead us to expect. Here’s a waveform showing the very small VOT in “sky”:

So, in effect, the /g/ in “guy” and the /k/ in “sky” are the same sound! Still don’t believe me? Well, first listen to sky, then listen to guy, then listen to “sky” where I’ve digitally removed the /s/. Your writing system has been lying to you!

So what does Jimi Hendrix kissing men have to do with Stop Acoustics?

When we look at the acoustics of “guy” and “sky”, it’s very easy to see that the difference the two different perceptions of the lyric (“kiss the sky” and “kiss this guy”) are incredibly similar. When we realize that in English, [k] and [g] are functionally the same thing, the difference between our two choices:

… is seen to be only a question of where you put the /s/, and thus, really, no difference at all.

So, we see that not only are sounds in English not what our writing systems makes them out to be, but that this “error” of perception is not only understandable, but linguistically fascinating as well.

So, next time you find yourself listening to Purple Haze, Thank Jimi Hendrix for providing one of the best examples of the perceptual troubles which can come from our lack of a voiced/voiceless-unaspirated contrast in the English language. Or, curse me for linguistically corrupting an otherwise good song. Either or, really.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language and Music, Language Usage, Phonetics and Phonology, Speech and Grammar Errors | Leave a Comment


One of my favorite expressions (stolen from House MD many years back) is “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not Zebras”. The general idea here is that if you see something, and you’re not sure what it is, don’t anticipate something odd or rare when there’s a more common explanation. Well, I was reminded of that this afternoon when I stumbled upon this quote in a forum I frequent:

“Without further a due, you can get the latest nightly builds [at this website]“

This is a form of phonological re-analysis. When we re-analyze a word or phrase, we’re usually replacing an uncommon or non-transparent word with something that’s phonologically similar (that sounds alike), but is much more common or makes more sense. These are also referred to as “eggcorns”, a term coined by Geoff Pullum.

So, the speaker stumbles with “Ado” is a Middle English word, according the New Oxford American Dictionary, “from northern Middle English at do ‘to do,’ from Old Norse at (used to mark an infinitive) and do”). Rather than using “further ado”, the speaker (typer?) replaces it with a phonologically identical pair of words (“ado” /ədu/ “a dye” /ə du/) which are much more common in the English language. In short, the speaker replaces the word “ado”, a certified Zebra, with a common set of English words, “a due”, and thus, thinks horses.

A whole herd of Zebras, all horsed

We really like, as speakers of language, to turn zerbras into This happens relatively frequently, with varying degrees of phonological similarity. I’ve seen “do process” for “due process” (homophones like above), “play it by year” instead of “play it by ear” (/plej ɪt baj iɹ/ vs. /plej ɪt baj jiɹ/), where word segmentation makes the difference. Google gives 216 hits for “Torn ass under”, a (creative!) re-analysis of “torn asunder” (/tɔɹn əsʌndəɹ/ vs the original /tɔɹn æs ʔʌndəɹ/) to get around the ambiguity of “asunder”, meaning “into various pieces”. Entertainingly, this same “sunder” root causes yet another Zebra reanalysis. Not infrequently, you’ll hear people talking about “various insundry goods” in case of “Various and Sundry Goods” (/vɛɹiəs ɪnsʌndɹi ɡʊds/ vs. /vɛɹiəs ən sʌndɹi ɡʊds/). “Sundry” is definitely a zebra if you’re not familiar with “sundries”, items of various kinds, although interestingly, here, it’s replaced with another zebra, “insundry”.

With a bit more phonological difference, we get the reanalysis that many love to hate: “all intensive purposes” can be swapped for “all intents and purposes” (/ɑl ɪntɛnsɪv pəɹpəsɪz/ vs. /ɑl ɪntɛns ən pəɹpəsɪz/). And if we do this at a whole-phrase level while listening to music, we can get Mondegreens, a term for misheard song lyrics (hearing Jimi Hendrix’ “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky” as “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy”).

So, this is a relatively common phenomenon, and gives us great information about how speakers are coping with the amount of homophony in our language. In closing, thanks for reading Lingua Stick Miss Tick, and more importantly, thanks for not spelling it that way.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Etymology, Language Change, Language Usage, Phonetics and Phonology, Speech and Grammar Errors | 1 Comment


A brief site update: Lately, I’ve been so busy teaching linguistics and writing linguistics that I’ve not had as much time or energy for posting linguistics here (although I do have a few posts on the back-burner). Instead of writing posts about language, I’ve been learning a great deal around the internet and in my other areas of passion which I want to share, both because some readers may find it interesting, and because I want Googlers to be able to find some of the solutions I’ve come up with. So, rather than diluting an otherwise quite linguistic blog with posts about my other interests (computers, software, music), I’ve instead started a new and (slightly) different blog: The Non-Linguistic Mystic (which you can find at non.linguisticmystic.com).

This site will be my space to post about things which, although hopefully still interesting to my readers, are not at all linguistic in nature. That way, people interested in the language blog can look here, people interested in a technology and music blog can look there, and everybody can be happy. Aalthough I’ve moved my review and followup of OS X “Lion” over to the new site, and nothing will change in any significant way over here.

On the other hand, if you are interested in technology, software, computing, music, and whatever else I choose to write about, make sure and check out the Non-Linguistic Mystic!

Tagged with Computers and Software, Site News | Leave a Comment

Read older posts »

All content © Linguistic Mystic 2006-2012 unless otherwise indicated.
Please contact me for permission to reprint or repost.

Site Information

  • Categories

  • Latest Non-linguistic Posts

  • Archives

    • Site features