To install, download the tgz file (the below code assumes you’ve downloaded it to the desktop), double click it to expand, then open a terminal and type:

cd ~/Desktop/sndpeek-1.3-exe

sudo cp bin/sndpeek /bin/

Once you hit enter after typing the above command, OS X will then ask for your OS X administrator password (to copy the file deep into the filesystem), and once you’ve done that, at any point in the future, you’ll be able to just type “sndpeek” into a terminal and it’ll pop up a window displaying whatever sound source is selected in your Sound input preference pane. I usually give a more complex command to produce a prettier output, “sndpeek –logfactor:0.5 –lissajous:OFF –features:OFF –depth:150′”

I encourage you to play with the software as there are few better tools to help understand what a spectral slice is, how it works, and how spectrograms can be made. Enjoy!

With a name like that, it couldn’t be anything but judgmental pedantry, but even in an otherwise eyeroll-worthy article, I found that several of these words are actually completely reasonable pronunciations, and several of them demonstrate interesting phonological processes. So, I’m going to discuss them a little bit.

Athlete (pronounced with a schwa in the middle, “Ath-uh-leet” /æθəlit/)

This is a very reasonable and common pronunciation, which I noticed extensively in the speech of even experts on the subject (Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is a notable /æθəlit/ speaker. Here, the change likely comes from our dislike of having an interdental sound (/θ/) right next to a lateral (/l/). If you attempt to make the “correct” pronunciation, you’ll notice that your tongue is, in a sense, trapped between your front teeth, and to make a smooth gesture, you end up having to attempt to curve the sides of the middle and back of your tongue down. Which is unpleasant. So, it’s not shocking at all that speakers who use the word often may add the schwa.

(It’s also worth noting that there is no ‘H’ in Athlete, despite the author’s smug assertions that “there is no vowel between the ‘H’ and the ‘L’ in any of these words”. The English “TH” in this word is actually a single sound, a voiceless interdental fricative, which is nothing resembling an /h/. Once again, pedantry is seldom done well enough to be immune to further pedantry.)

Utmost (pronounced as “upmost”, /ʌpmowst/)

This is an awesome example of assimilation, two sounds becoming more like one another to make the speaker’s life easier, a phenomenon I’ve discussed before. Here, in the “correct” pronunciation, /ʌtmowst/, we have a /t/ sound, created at the alveolar ridge (just behind the teeth, try it) followed immediately by /m/, a bilabial sound created by pressing the two lips together.

When speakers are “mispronouncing” the word as /ʌpmowst/, they’re actually being more efficient, substituting in a /p/, also a bilabial sound, which allows them to simply close their lips (creating the /p/), then lower the velum (allowing nasal airflow) and start voicing to begin making the /m/. Going from /p/ to /m/ requires no additional tongue or lip movement, whereas going from /t/ to /m/ requires reconfiguration of the tongue and lips. Efficiency. Not quite the idiot pronunciation he’s claiming.

Sherbet (pronounced as “sher-bert”, /ʃɜɹbəɹt/)

Why does Primer Magazine hate assimilation? The first syllable has an “err” (/ɜɹ/) sound, why not the second syllable too? If we can keep the whole word vaguely “r-sounding” (“rhotic”, in phonetic terms), all the better. Speakers love regularity. Primer Magazine doesn’t.

“For all intensive Purposes”

This is really a horsed zebra. For further discussion of this, see a post I made last week.

Often (pronounced as “offen”, /ɑfɪn/)

How many Americans say “often” with the /t/, ever? This is textbook deletion of an unpleasant sound to simplify a cluster, and it’s one carried out by many, many people. Why bother with a /ft/ cluster when there’s no need to keep it around? It’s not like there’s another word, “Offen”, which this form of “often” could be confused with, and frankly, for speed, fluidity, and social reasons (in the US), the “offen” pronunciation is really a better choice.

Edit: OK, I misread this one completely in my anti-pedant rage. The author of the quoted article is actually _in favor_ of “offen” as the “proper” form, and I responded assuming that he, like so many others have, was arguing that “often” (with a /t/) is the only proper form. So, I’ve culled some of the anger from the post, and kept the phonology. Thanks, commenter!

Awry (pronounced as “aw-ree”, /’ɑɹi/ instead of “uh-rye” /ə’ɹaj/)

This word is a textbook example of why our writing system needs to be taken out behind the barn and dispatched as humanely as possible. Although “wry” is used for the proper /ɹaj/ pronunciation in the word “wry” (and only there), usually the “aw” digraph represents /ɑ/ (as in “claw”, “maw”, “awful”, “awkward”) and the “ry” represents /ɹi/ (as in “fury”, “worry”, “scurry”). I can understand the author feeling the need to state the proper pronunciation of the word, but his indignation at the thought that anybody could EVER think “awry” is pronounced “aw-ree” is just silly.

So, there’s a bit of phonological goodness wrung out of an otherwise dry and pedantic bit of prescriptivism. Which I am going to pronounce as “per-scriptivism” for the remainder of the day. Just to anger Justin Brown.

This left me thinking about Peer Review, and what it really accomplishes. In my eyes, peer review (at least in the Linguistic world) accomplishes three things:

1) It weeds out papers which are clearly unfit for publication (due to bad science, missing data, or overall crank-ish-ness.

2) It improves the quality of papers by forcing needed revisions before papers can see the light of day.

3) Most importantly, it’s establishing a web of trust, in this case, between the journal and the reader, that the contents represent good scholarly work.

The third point is, to my mind, most interesting. When I read a paper from the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, I trust that it is reasonably likely to be describing sound (sorry, bad pun) research. I can assume that somebody with some expertise on the matter has read the paper, and that if it had major faults, it wouldn’t have gotten through the black-box review process. I then, as an academic, decide whether each individual journal is worthy of my trust. I may decide that although JASA is worthy of my trust, a trade journal for hearing aid companies may not necessarily be, and in doing so, I develop a web of trust.

Another prominent web of trust

This is somewhat analogous to the way that PGP‘s Web of Trust is structured. Using PGP, let’s say I want to check whether a given cryptographically signed email really comes from John Q. Smith.

Well, if I know John personally and have exchanged (and signed) each other’s PGP keys in person, I can just check to see if the key I have directly from him matches the key which signed the email. If it matches, no problems.

However, you’ve not met everybody you might want to receive ID-confirmed email from. So, the Web of Trust comes into play. Imagine instead that John Smith is a good friend of Jane Doe, who is a good friend of yours. John and Jane, may have exchanged keys at some point, and in the process, Jane would have signed his key (a complex process which doesn’t merit full explanation here), asserting that that key really belongs to John. Jane and I, being friends, would have exchanged and signed keys as well.

When I get the email from “John”, my PGP software will look to see whether I’ve signed and trust John’s key. If not, it’ll see whether anybody I do trust has signed the key as actually belonging to John. In this case, because Jane says that it’s really him, and I trust Jane, I trust the key on the incoming email, and I can say (reasonably) that the email comes from who it says it does.

How do these ideas mix?

Right now, the journal system is oddly equivalent to the above web. I may have never met the author(s) of a given paper, and I have absolutely no idea whether their work merits discussion, examination, or citation. However, because JASA has, in effect, signed the work by publishing it, I choose to trust a given work as being of a better, citation-quality nature than the same paper floating around an author’s personal website. An author who publishes frequently in a journal I trust then earns trust for future publications.

Revocation of trust happens, too (see what happened with the (bogus) Wakefield Vaccine study and The Lancet), but by and large, academic journals serve as the foundation for the academic publishing Web of Trust.

That’s what people don’t want to lose

For many of us, raised in open-source culture and working on projects funded by government grants, it seems bizzarre to consider signing one’s work over to a journal which will make large amounts of money by restricting access to our work, not a dime of which will ever reach us. So, the idea of open-access and the elimination of paywall-based journals is an attractive one.

However, simply cutting these journals out of the loop would, overnight, destroy the web of trust around which we have so far built our academic community. Without a replacement we’re left only able to trust the work we’ve explicitly and carefully reviewed, or which comes from authors whose work we inherently trust.

The democratization of academic publishing isn’t just about open access or reducing journal bureaucracy. Instead, it also has to be based on the opening (and increased transparency) of the review process, a more efficient and open way of choosing which articles are worthy of note, citation, or derision.

A half-baked proposal

Imagine a system in which a paper is submitted to an online archive, and considered by anybody who cares to review it. If a paper is found to be sound by a given reader or reviewer, it can be signed (much like in the PGP sense above) by that person. Then, if I decide to search for a paper, I can find first papers trusted by people I know and trust. Then, if I find none, I can start the more arduous process of fully examining papers which are signed by people I don’t trust, or which aren’t signed at all. Then, if I find a paper reliable enough, I sign it, and so the web expands.

This, unfortunately, has many downsides. It does away with anonymous peer review, allowing tensions and malice to build quite easily between reviewers and authors. This, though, may not be a terrible thing, as the most picky, unpleasant, or theoretically-encumbered reviewers would easily fall to the side.

It also doesn’t allow for revisions as easily as the journal model, and doesn’t provide a mechanism to drop the lowest quality work outright. That said, potential, higher-profile signers could certainly request certain revisions before signing. This, in turn, could very easily lead to inequality among reviewers, with big names able to push for specific changes (to better support their own work, say) before signing.

Also, you would get people who sign for pay, for reciprocation, due to pressure from others, or who just don’t give a damn about the quality of the paper and sign for some other reason. These people, especially if prominent in the field, could very easily pull down the fabric of the system, and allow bad work through for their own theoretical, political or personal reasons. So, this system requires a degree of objectivity and sense of what’s best for the field which many humans may lack.

Finally, it requires more participation and thought about trust than most are willing to put in. You need to ask yourself uncomfortable questions about who you trust, whose papers really are well written, and how much you need to know about a person’s integrity and work before their research is beyond question.

But most of these are actually failings which are already in the existing system, but are masked by the journal process.

I’m not saying this is the way of the future, nor that it’s even a good idea, but I am saying that perhaps the academic community has a lot to learn from the world of cryptography, where trust is examined more closely and pondered more abstractly than it currently is in the world of academic and scientific publication. You’ll just have to trust me about that.

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.

“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.

The first Hammered Dulcimer I ever owned (a Masterworks Russell Cook Edition) was very nice, and it had one characteristic odd note: E320 had an almost low-back-vowel-ey sound to it. Unfortunately, it also had a rattle inside the instrument which couldn’t be repaired, so it went back to their shop for diagnostics, and Russell (very generously) built me a new one, almost identical, save a few small changes.

That second dulcimer, my current dulcimer-love, is a beautiful instrument, but playing around this evening, I realized that that note doesn’t have that same quality (which I do now miss, ever-so-slightly), but I wasn’t sure what that quality was. Many of the rest of the notes sound nicer, so I don’t fault it, but it’s definitely different.

The Phonetics of Musical Instruments

This left me wondering, how do I determine that difference? Then, I remembered I’m a phonetics nerd, I do acoustical analysis of sounds for a living, so I decided to apply the same methodologies to my dulcimer(s).

First, I pulled up two recordings of the same song, one per dulcimer, new-and-old, in Praat. Then, I found the same timepoint of the same hit of that same note from both songs. I made a Fourier spectrum at that point for each of the two dulcimers for comparison (using the procedure described in Section 6.9 of Using Praat for Linguistic Research). This shows the amplitude (power) of all of the frequencies which make up the signal.

Below is the result:

(Also, for those interested, here’s the parts of the songs extracted with the odd note. The note in question is the third prominent note hit. Don’t mind the tempo change, my playing had improved in the two years between allowing me to play the song at faster speeds. Listen to the First Dulcimer and the Second Dulcimer.)

One can very clearly see how different these two notes are in terms of Timbre. The first dulcimer shows an almost vocalic set of strong resonances and weak ones. These resemble the resonances in vowel formants (see this spectrum of the vowel /ɔ/ for comparison), which explains why that note sounds so vowel-like to me. We can see that the second dulcimer shows a much more consistently tall set of harmonic peaks, with a much more consistent spectral tilt.

So, a little bit of phonetic analysis lets us see that although two instruments may be made by the same company, they may be the same instrument model, but they can have two fundamentally different voices.

This phenomenon itself isn’t noteworthy from a linguistic standpoint (“Web 2.0” seems to have been the same sort of trendy buzzword at some point), but it occurred to me today that for many less-tech-saavy users, this “in the cloud” phrasing might actually be affecting how people view these services, and I think that might be why companies have latched onto this term so strongly.

Let’s take, for example, Apple’s coming “iCloud” information hosting service. Apple is increasingly targeting the non-tech-saavy crowd, and this service, like most of their recent developments, is meant to be largely transparent to the end user. Once you’ve signed up, iCloud will take your music, your photos, your documents, your books, your backups, your contacts, calendars and mail, and any additional information you add in through third party programs, and make it instantly available on all of your devices. As they put it on their own website: “Create a document, iCloud stores it, and pushes it to your devices”. Bam. Magic. You turn the service on and suddenly your data is on all of your devices. Who wouldn’t want that?

A rose by any other name…

They’re doing something linguistically fascinating, though: they make no mention of their machines, servers, databases or storage (at least on the user-facing sites). You create, something cloudy happens, it’s on all your machines. They’ve de-emphasized the middle step. Mind you, Apple’s not the only “cloud” provider to do this (Google Docs de-emphasizes the middle step too), but Apple is certainly the most flagrant. But why bother? Why de-emphasize?

Well, I’ve been toying around with a new hobby. Whenever somebody says “in the cloud”, I’ve found it entertaining to replace it with “on somebody else’s computer”. This simple replacement brings me much joy in the absurdity it creates and how oddly different it makes the act sound:

“Our main working copy of the paper is on somebody else’s computer for group editing, but it’s password protected so nobody but us can edit it”

“My data is safe, I store my address book, mail, passwords, documents and photos on somebody else’s computer.”

“Oh, don’t worry, all of our business information is backed up on somebody else’s computer.”

When put like that, we’re emphasizing the storage, the step that Apple and Google and most of the other cloud providers don’t really want you to think about too much. We’re emphasizing the fact that your data is sitting on a hard drive in another state, watched by a sysadmin who you don’t know. We’re emphasizing that when you put something on the cloud, it’s no longer just yours, and whereas naive users might not hesitate to put something into an amorphous cloud, actually transferring their data onto another computer might tickle enough of their sense of privacy to make them hesitate to upload those bank statements or that racy note from a lover.

In addition, we emphasize the fact that the data is there for the cloud provider to use per the TOS. How much do you think that the recording industry would pay to analyze en masse the music library of hundreds of thousands of iGadget users, even if just for market research? How valuable would it be for a website to figure out where to advertise by asking a company storing passwords “in the cloud” which sites are also visited by people who have stored passwords for their site?

Simply put, putting your data “in the cloud” is amorphous. It’s a mystery, but at the end of it, it just works. Putting your data on somebody else’s computer can get the same ends, but it forces you to think about your data in between your machine and your other devices.

Clouds aren’t necessarily bad

This may sound like a paranoid luddite’s rant, but I use the cloud. I currently use MobileMe, Apple’s current iCloud equivalent, for calendar and address book syncing. I use DropBox to keep my grocery list current across all my devices. I have an SFTP provider for storing backups of my data between at-home backups, and in case of emergency. The cloud can provide, in addition to convenience, a type of security against loss. As a friend of mine pointed out on Google+ (a cloud app):

Somebody else’s computer, with extensive redundancy and backup systems, which makes it much less likely to be lost if my house burns down. It is one kind of security. Not the “no one else will look at it” kind, but the “I won’t lose it in a domestic disaster” kind.

This is certainly true, and one of the best arguments for decentralized, cloud-like computing. Data on my computer in my backpack is fleeting. Data on a well-backed-up server in Dropbox’s massive datacenter is much less likely to be dropped, stolen, lit on fire or broken. These services have a use, whether convenience, ease-of-use for non-tech users, decentralization, or simply as an offsite backup of your data.

The techies who have read this far are doubtless thinking “Come on, I knew this already”. Of course data stored in the cloud is stored on somebody else’s computers. Heck, geeks like myself can likely picture server farms, maybe even imagining the mass storage required. They have a good idea of what sorts of things cloud providers can and can’t do across petabytes of data.

It’s not like I’m blowing the whistle on a massive conspiracy here. Anybody who has thought more than 20 minutes about the idea of a cloud knows that information has to go somewhere, and has deduced that presumably, it’s sitting on somebody else’s computer. Apple’s not choosing to skirt the issue so they can “pull a fast one” on the entire internet, they’re doing it because it’s less intimidating to new users. Google Docs is neglecting to mention their servers because they don’t need to. That’s not why you should be using the phrase “on somebody else’s computer”.

We should be talking about uploading your documents onto somebody else’s computer with grandma when she gets her new laptop and decides that that “iCloud” folder is just like her hard drive. We should be discussing storing information on somebody else’s computer for the clueless CFO who wants to upload the company’s records onto DropBox to be able to work on them from his new iPad.

We should be talking about “the cloud” as storing information on somebody else’s computer so that people will think, if only for a second, about whether they care that that picture, document, or file is something they would be OK with storing on somebody else’s computer.

Because TOSes, “privacy policies”, talking around the issue and other calming language aside, that’s what the cloud is. It’s a vast collection of other people’s computers, and in order to decide intelligently whether you want your data there, you need to know where “there” is.

If you’re interested, check out:

My Linguistics Bookmarks

My Phonetics/Phonology Bookmarks

My Natural Language Processing Bookmarks

Thanks, and I hope you all are enjoying your linguistic lives!

Phonology, just to recap, is the study of how sounds pattern and interact within words and sentences in different languages. Phonology is language specific, in that every language has its own phonology, each having different sounds, and different preferences. This is why Russian allows the /x/ sound (as in Bach, Khrushchev, Chanukah, and Loch Ness) but English doesn’t. This is also why Japanese speakers, when borrowing the word “christmas”, will usually change it into something more like “kurisumasu”, because they simply don’t like having a syllable end with a consonant.

These language-specific preferences are often enforced with phonological rules, which, when an undesirable combination is made, will change one or more of the sounds in the word to make it more acceptable. So, for instance, the plural of “dish” /dɪʃ/ isn’t “dishs” */dɪʃs/, because that would make us put two strident fricatives (a special class of sound containing the sh sound (/ʃ/), /s/, /z/ and the “zh” sound in pleasure /ʒ/) together, and that’s just awkward for us as English speakers. So, a rule kicks in to add in a vowel /dɪʃs/-> /dɪʃəs/, and a second rule kicks in to prevent a voiced/voiceless pairing (Your larynx vibrates during the added vowel, but does not during the /s/) and changes the /s/ to a /z/, its voiced equivalent.

This is somewhat of a simplification, and there’s actually a lot of good evidence that /z/ is the plural (as in “dogs”) rather than /s/, but still, you can see how here, rules are interacting, and changing undesirable combinations into more desirable ones.

For my next class, I had to prepare a slideshow discussing common phonological processes (among other things), and I was having trouble finding a good hook, a good analogy to help the students understand the dynamics at play. So, I asked myself…

Where on earth do petty differences and subtle preferences constantly and violently change combinations according to a set of unpublished, unconscious laws?

Then it hit me: High School.

All the cool phonemes are doing it…

High school, for those of you unfamiliar, is a type of secondary education institution, attended by students in grades 8-12 (usually ages 13-19). Here, there’s no shortage of raging hormones, crazy dramas, and friendships form and dissolve capriciously, and as such, well, it rather nicely parallels the complex interrelationships between sounds.

So, with this analogy in hand, I set out to explain the four most common types of phonological rules/changes in Phonology using High School drama.

#1: Assimilation/Peer Pressure

Assimilation, in phonological terms, is where sounds change to become more similar to one another.

So, for instance, a nasal sound which is usually made with the tongue in the front of the mouth, at the alveolar ridge (like the “n” in “thin”) might move to the velum (at the back of the mouth) when it’s near a velar consonant. To test this for yourself, say the word “thin” a few times, noting the position of the tongue during the /n/, then say “thin kids” repeatedly, and note how your tongue is likely now positioned in the back of your mouth when making that /n/. In phonological terms, the /n/ has become an /ŋ/ before another velar sound. This is an example of “nasal place assimilation”, and is exceptionally common throughout the world.

Assimilation Complete.

In High School, assimilation is an incredibly common process, and is usually referred to as “peer pressure” or “trying to fit in”. If all the other kids in a social group smoke, chances are, new additions will start smoking too. Similarly, if all the sounds around a given segment are voiced, there’s a strong pressure for that segment to become voiced as well.

This analogy is really useful for phonological analysis, believe it or not. If a parent can’t figure out why her child is suddenly snorting lines of Vitamin C, chances are, if the parent examines the friends surrounding her child, she’ll find that they all are doing it too. Similarly, if you can’t figure out why this sound is being nasalized here, just look at its friends. Chances are, they’re all hanging out behind the gym and giving nasality a try.

#2: Dissimilation/Rebellion

Dissimilation is when sounds change to become LESS similar to one another, usually to heighten a contrast which otherwise might not be apparent.

A good example of this in English is the words “surprise” and “berserk”. Surprise, at least nominally, has two r-sounds, one before the /p/ and one after it. But in practice, and especially in fast speech, speakers don’t like that much rhoticity (r-like-ness) in a single word, so they’ll turn that first r-sound back into a schwa (meaning that /səɹpɹajz/ is usually realized as /səpɹajz/). The same goes with “berserk”. When was the last time you heard somebody make both r sounds in berserk?

You’re dissimilar. We get it. Calm down.

Dissimilation is, in my mind, the phonological process that creates rebellion in all its forms. If Mommy and Daddy are well-heeled and conservative, little Jimmy’s gonna be a Maoist. If all the other kids at the school are preppy and straight-laced, you know that Goth kids will emerge.

Just like in phonology, people just can’t stand too little contrast, so they will sometimes take on features only to differentiate themselves from the crowd. If your sound is suddenly velar when surrounded with alveolar sounds, chances are, it’s rebelling and wanting to be different. And sometimes, that desire alone is enough to make a sound change its way of life.

#3: Epenthesis/Showing up on other people’s dates

Epenthesis is a generic term for whenever a sound seems to pop up out of nowhere to help block an awkward or undesirable combination or situation. Often, it’s vowels which are epenthesizing, but consonants pop up too on occasion.

We’ve actually already discussed an example of this, where an epenthesis rule kicks in to add in a vowel when making the plural of “dish” or “wish” or “diss” (/dɪʃs/-> [dɪʃəz]), which serves to prevent awkward /sz/ and /ʃz/ combinations. Similarly, when Japanese speakers are adding in extra vowels when borrowing words like “Christmas” (which turns into “kurisumasu”), they’re doing it to prevent ending any syllables with consonants, which Japanese speakers just do not like doing.

ø -> me / [you]__[that jerk you're dating] (Image Credit)

Epenthesis is a bit trickier, but imagine this scenario. So, Claire like totally likes Daniel. And he’s like, totally cute, and OMG they are TOTALLY meant to be. But then Daniel starts dating Kate. OMG!!

So, rather than just letting the two of them be happy together, Claire starts showing up. They go to the movies, Claire wants to come too. They’re going to grab lunch, and Claire’s totally there. If they’re all at a party, you know that Claire is all over Daniel, and sitting with them, and doing everything she can to pop up often enough, to come between them often enough, to let Daniel see what she has to offer and to stop him from dating that ^%$@$ Kate!

That, my friends, is epenthesis. When one person pops up to try and prevent a combination or situation which is undesirable. Mind you, it can also occur in other social situations. If you find out your blind date is rather creepy, you might arrange to meet up with a friend later in the evening, so that your date won’t get any ideas and so your friend can stop any really bad interactions from occurring. Or it can even be so simple as choosing to tag along when her creepy ex-boyfriend offers to walk your intoxicated friend home. Each of these is a situation where a person pops up, seemingly out of nowhere, to prevent an awkward combination.

In Phonology, if sounds suddenly pop up, that needs to be your cue to be on the lookout for awkward situations. If there’s suddenly a glottal stop between those two vowels, maybe it’s a sign that the language doesn’t want those vowels to be together. Or if you suddenly get a schwa between two sounds which with otherwise assimilate, you can bet that the language isn’t interested in that assimilation occurring. Put differently, “OMG that /t/ TOTALLY can’t turn into a nasal next to that /n/ or it will ruin THE WHOLE MORPHEME! I’m totally gonna epenthesize a schwa to break them up. Besides, that /t/ shouldn’t be hooking up with that skank /n/ anyways, he’s MINE!”

#4: Deletion/Uninviting

Deletion in Phonology is, as you might imagine, when a sound gets deleted from a word or morpheme to prevent an awkward or undesirable combination or situation.

A really good example of this is in the word “fifth”. Nominally, there are two /f/ sounds in there (/fɪfθ/), but if we leave that second /f/ in there, we end up with an /fθ/ combination, which is just pretty awkward to say. So, usually, especially in faster speech, we’ll delete that second /f/ altogether (leaving us with [fɪθ]).

Deletion also happens a lot in borrowings. In Russian, the city we call “Moscow” is Москва (pronounced “Mosk-va”, /moskvɑ/). But we English speakers just don’t care for that /skv/ cluster, so we’ve chosen to delete the /v/ altogether (as well as taping on a diphthong), giving us our pronunciation, /mɑskaw/.

It’s OK, Panda, there are always other parties.

Deletion happens all the time in High School Drama. If you’re planning this totally awesome party and you invited Kirk and Sally and Jenny and Ron and all the cool kids, then suddenly Kirk and Sally break up, well, you’re in a quandary. If you invite both Kirk and Sally, they’ll be fighting and bickering and awkward and just being an undesirable combination, so you don’t want to do that. But if you uninvite them both, then everybody’s going to miss them, and you’ll seem really uncool. So you have to carefully weigh who would bring more to the party, and eventually choose which of them will be missed less, and uninvite them.

Similarly, if it looks like a sound is being deleted, your first question should be “why”? Why would it be awkward or undesirable for that sound to show up there? Obviously, /k/ and /v/ didn’t just break up with each other, but clearly we have a motivation to not let them get together. So, remember, no phonological change is random, and languages tend not to like deleting things without good cause, so that little deletion may represent avoidance of a really nasty situation for speakers. Because nobody wants awkward morphemes.

There’s always more drama

Of course, these are just the four main types of phonological rules and changes which occur, and there is no shortage of other interesting, more specific types of changes. But, taking a broad view, many of the phonological changes you’ll deal with throughout your linguistic career are going to result in assimilation, dissimilation, epenthesis or deletion. And as you’re puzzling over why that /i/ just disappeared or why that /x/ suddenly became an /ʃ/, I encourage you to consider the more human side of phonology, and to think back to high school and all the crazy social alternations which happened there.

Because NOBODY puts lax vowels at the end of MY syllables!!!!1!

I am in my 3rd year of a bachelor degree in Linguistics, and I love it! I am just wondering what I could actually do with the skills I am learning… I mean for a living.

What you can do depends on what you enjoy doing, and how advanced a degree you want to (and can) get.

If you want to start working after you get the BA, there are some possibilities for linguistics-specific sort of work. Lots of industries are using linguists for market research, especially doing things like data annotation and analysis on content and whatnot. You probably won’t be making many decisions at first, and you’re more likely to find jobs which just pay you hour-by-hour to do annotation. There is also the military/intelligence route, if that’s your style.

Mind you, with just the BA, linguistics-specific jobs will be scarce, you’ll be at a lower pay grade than an MA or Ph.D student, and the point of entry is going to be a bit lower on the totem pole, but of course, you can work up. If you’re going this route, I’d recommend trying to do an Honors Thesis, so you have an example of some research you’ve done in the field of Linguistics, and so you can show having some degree of specialization in the field.

If you’re able to get into an MA program and graduate, you’ve got many more options beyond the ones discussed above.

There are plenty of industry jobs out there for Linguistics MAs, especially if you’ve got a speech or computational bent. Google and big tech companies always want Natural Language Processing people, and places like Rosetta Stone are often hiring linguists for speech analysis, language analysis, and data collection. And every speech recognition place in the world wants more linguists and phoneticians.

The main disadvantage to industry jobs is that you end up having to deal with lawyers, NDAs, and non-compete clauses. Some companies are very draconian, preventing you from publishing on languages you’ve worked with while working for them, and some of them even claim as proprietary any insights you might have about the grammar or functioning of natural languages. As such, you may end up working for a company that actually claims as proprietary parts of the grammar of the language you’re working with. By going industry, you’re often going to have to sacrifice the openness and dedication to spreading knowledge that’s omnipresent in Academia, and you certainly won’t be able to take as much credit for your research. Instead, you’ll be studying language to improve your company’s profitability and product, with much of what you actually do and discover hidden behind the veils of corporate secrecy, under penalty of lawyer. All that said, the pay will be better than in academia, and I strongly suspect that not all industry players are as draconian and litigious as some of the subjects of the horror stories I’ve heard from friends in industry.

Some places, usually private language schools or companies, will hire Linguistics MA students to teach English as a second language, especially outside of English speaker countries. If you enjoy living abroad, that’s a very good option, as some of those places are willing to pay handsomely for your expertise. So, definitely keep that option in mind.

In academia, an MA degree can definitely get you a job as a research assistant or researcher, helping with experimental linguistics and working in labs to help faculty members. It’s also possible that you’ll get a TA job, especially if you’re in the MA program at the time. Unfortunately, though, you’d be extremely unlikely to end up in a tenure track position with just the MA.

Also, it’s worth noting that many schools will also hire MA-level research assistants for the long term, who have specialized in a given area and participate in projects where they’re necessary. Here, you have some job security, and the possibility of being paid well, but without having to go through the Ph.D process.

If you’re accepted into a Ph.D program, many doors open. In many places, people admitted into a Ph.D program with support will automatically be given a job as a teaching assistant or a research assistant. This is wonderful because you get that experience, and you can earn enough to keep yourself afloat, at a part time basis, while you’re getting the degree. If you’re applying to Ph.D programs, apply to a bunch of them, and decide between the programs which offer you support, either as a stipend or as a TA/RA job. As my advisor told me during the Ph.D application process, “there are lots of places willing to pay you if you fit well, so you should never use your own money to get a Ph.D”. So, in academia, there are plenty of jobs for Ph.D students that an MA student would be less likely to.

Also, there are lots of industry companies that are happy to snatch Ph.D students away from academia, even if they’ve not finished the degree, and a few of my friends have taken this route. For them, they get most of the the benefits of somebody with Ph.D level education, but without having to pay the salary of somebody with a full on Doctoral degree. So, as silly as it sounds, even if you’re looking to go into industry after you get your MA, it might not hurt you to apply to Ph.D programs, and to accept an offer. You’ll likely get pulled in by other companies at a higher pay grade, and if you decide to return to academia later (and you kept publishing), you’ll have been accepted once.

Mind you, once you’re out of academia and a Ph.D program, it’s always tougher to get back in, and if the job you left for leaves you, especially if some time has passed, you risk having trouble there. So, unless you need the extra money right away, or you’re offered your dream job with great security, I’d highly recommend you work for the company as much as you can while still working on your Ph.D and dissertation, but keep working on that Ph.D and dissertation. They’ll pay you more when you graduate, and once you’ve got that magical piece of paper, everything will be just a bit easier in case you end up changing jobs down the road.

Finally, if you fight through and get the Ph.D, you’ve got your pick. Nearly all of the opportunities mentioned above will be open to you, and new doors will open besides.

Industry will likely want you, especially if you’ve got the right specialization for their programs. You’ll also be paid more than MA and Ph.D student candidates, and will likely come in higher on the totem pole. You’ll be more likely to be able to guide events, not just annotate or work on problems.

There are also jobs for linguists in other places that aren’t industry, but aren’t quite academia either. For instance, many linguists, some who are faculty elsewhere, can become known as being good expert witnesses in trials and lawsuits which deal with matters of language and communication. Some people end up practicing forensic linguistics in law enforcement and intelligence, analyzing language to learn about speakers. Of course, there are also plenty of opportunities in intelligence, defense, and working for the military or military intelligence services.

In academia, you’ll have the opportunity to take a Post Doctoral appointment, doing research or teaching at a school for a few years before putting yourself on the market as a professor or researcher. This can be as part of a grant or a project, or simply as a member of a department who needs some help for a little while.

You can try for a research position, where you’ll have minimal teaching load, and instead, are used more to bring the department prestige, grant money, and publications. If research is your thing, then larger, research universities are where you’ll want to be, and these sorts of positions are definitely right up your alley.

You can also choose a lecturer or adjunct faculty position, where you’re not on track for tenure, and you’ll not have much in the way of job security beyond a few years, but it’s a job, and you’ll be at the helm of classes and getting paid for a few years. This is a great option if other factors in your life are preventing you from committing to a longer term stay in a given place, or if you’re simply not sure that you’re wanting to teach for the rest of your life.

Finally, some people, like me, eventually want to become full, tenured professors and pass on this knowledge in new and interesting ways to new and interesting people. To do this, you’ll likely start as an assistant professor, work your way up, and ideally, eventually win tenure. As a tenured professor, you’ll teach, do some research, publish, and participate in the workings of the university. You’ll be faculty, have the benefits and security of such, and be paid the salary of a full professor. It’s a pretty sweet gig, but winning such jobs can often be very competitive.

Mind you, this is just my perspective. I’m just a little Doctoral student, I have my own particular biases, and there are likely a zillion opportunities that I’ve never been exposed to or even heard of. I’d recommend that you talk to your advisors in the department, talk to other linguists, and watch sites where linguistics jobs are posted (like LINGUIST list).

Most of all, though, follow your passion. If you want to do research, take jobs that offer you that chance. If you want to develop new and interesting products, and make a good deal of money doing it, look into industry jobs. If you’re like me and you just want to teach, well, keep pushing, keep collecting the necessary degrees, and eventually, you’ll be able to get there.

At least, I sure hope so.

Program note: I’ve been getting a lot of very good questions from readers, and although not all of them are this involved, I’m going to try and start posting some of my responses. I make no guarantees that I’ll be able to answer every question, but if you send me a good one, I’ll try and respond, and who knows, I might even post your response here. Let me know if you’d like to be credited for your questions, if I do end up responding publicly. Thanks for all the feedback and email, even in my relative absence. It always makes me smile.

Edit:: I just got this email from a reader who wanted to contribute her story. You’re welcome to email your own story, and I’ll make sure it ends up here!

I’m a former linguistics student, hopeful future linguistics student, and forever in love with linguistics. I was reading your post on jobs and just wanted to say that having a BA in Linguistics has helped me get jobs as a private ESL tutor, but mainly as a tutor for high school level reading and writing skills, and also as a SAT Critical Reading/Writing tutor. Now, tutoring English for the SAT can be a somewhat tedious job, but it is related to language, I always find ways to sneak in excerpts from the Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, and I can often get kids thinking about language in general. Plus, I get to help them improve their scores and get into college, thereby furthering the education of a generation (while rhyming). I also get to tell them how wonderful linguistics is, if they’ll listen, and hopefully plant a seed in the minds of those who are unsure of what to study. So overall, I do find it a satisfying job, and one that required only a BA in Linguistics. Now, I do intend to go for a PhD in either Neurolinguistics or linguistic anthropology (endangered languages maybe, a la The Linguists), and one day teach at a higher level, but for right now tutoring is good work and is definitely a worthwhile job.