Phonetics and Phonology : Notes from a Linguistic Mystic

12.31.11 | Re-analyzing Zebras into Horses

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

12.04.11 | Same instrument, different acoustical soul

Recently, I’ve been reading about old Violins and how they are crafted, and this has made me think about the differences among modern Hammered Dulcimers, of which I’m an amateur player.

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.

Tagged with Computers and Software, Language and Music, Phonetics and Phonology | Leave a Comment

09.10.11 | My linguistic Bookmarks list

I’ve been incredibly busy of late with teaching, but I’ve got a pinboard.in account and have begun adding new linguistics-related bookmarks there, as both a resource for my students and for my own enjoyment.

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!

Tagged with Computational Linguistics, Conventional Linguistics, Linguistic Mysticism, Notes, Phonetics and Phonology, Recommended Links, Site News | 1 Comment