Often, the sort of things you study in Linguistics can seem really theoretical and abstract. One of the most notoriously abstract fields in linguistics is Phonology, or the study of the sound systems of a language. However, if you’re looking for it, even the most abstract bits of phonological theory can pop up in everyday life, and sometimes, with a vastly humorous result.

Phonology rules!

Phonology is the study of the rules and systems which govern the use of sounds in a language. Some of these rules in English, for example, tell us that a velar nasal can’t start a word in English, that “in-possible” has become “impossible”, and that the /t/ sound is completely different after an /s/ than it is at the start of a word (it’s unaspirated). All these effects, although cool when studied closely, happen at a subconscious level, and really don’t have much effect on the lives of speakers.

However, Phonology can get really fascinating when a person is speaking a language not their own. Although anybody can memorize words and grammar in a second language, it’s a long process to be able to disregard the phonological rules of your own language and use the ones of the new language.

When a non-native speaker has an “accent”, what’s actually happening is that they’re speaking your language, but using some of the phonological rules from their native tongue. With time (and practice), an accent slowly goes away, but it’s often the last stage of language learning, and is the culmination of years of work.

Let’s look at a specific example. In Russian speech, you can never have more than one long /o/ sound in a word. Even if the word you’re pronouncing is written with several ‘o’ sounds (like молоко, ‘milk’), only the one of them in a stressed position (explained below) will be pronounced, and the rest will be reduced into an /a/ or /ə/ (the sounds in ‘pot’ and ’sofa‘). So, молоко is pronounced ‘mahluhkoh’ (/malə’ko:/), never “mohlohkoh” (/mo:lo:’ko:/). For more detailed information on this rule, see the Wikipedia page on Vowel Reduction in Russian

From Car Sales to prostitution

So, we’re sitting in my High School Russian class one day and we’re discussing vocabulary related to buying and selling. Our teacher, a Russian woman who still has a very noticeable Russian accent, is explaining the scenario for the next dialogue she’d like to do in class:

“Alright. So, Nick, I would like you to pretend to come up to me on a car lot. We will talk, and then, I will ask you if you would like to buy my Volva…”

Now, at this point, around half of the class either broke out laughing or was a bit too shocked to say anything at all. It’s worth pointing out that in her speech, the /ʌ/ sound in ‘but’ or ‘putter’ was always expressed with an /o/ sound, so to us, it sounded exactly like she just asked a student to buy her vulva.

At this point, she was looking around the classroom, confused, and trying to figure out what she had said. Some brave soul asked her what exactly she was selling, and she repeated, “I’m selling my volva!”. Another round of snickering coursed through the room.

At this point, she started to get frustrated. “No, it is a car. A volva!”. Slowly, the snickering began to calm, until finally, she went up to the board and wrote out “Volvo”, then pointed at it. “See! Volva!”

A chorus of groans of understanding rang out through the room, and she finally regained her composure. I’m not sure she ever understood what she actually said, but in a way, I think it’s better that way.

Although I didn’t really get it at the time, what my teacher was doing is actually perfectly understandable from a phonological standpoint. She was stressing only one of the O’s that she saw in the spelling, and the other vowel was reduced. Because she usually used a shorter /o/ sound for the /ʌ/ vowel, we understood her as saying “vulva”, not “volvo”.

Thus, directly because of a phonological rule, a normal day of class turned into a celebration of cross-linguistic hilarity. To this day, I can’t look at a Volvo without hearing my teacher saying “Would you like to buy my vulva?”, and it’s my favorite example of phonology gone wrong.

Writing is a wonderful thing. It allows us to get things off of our minds, to remind ourselves of something, or even to communicate across long distances without the benefit of voice. The beauty of an established writing system is that, if you write something down and leave it out in the open, any literate person that walks by will be able to understand it.

However, there are times when you’d rather your writings not necessarily be understandable to others. Sometimes, like if you’re keeping a journal and detailing the various angsts and dramas of your life, you’d rather that the relevant parties not be able to read the entries. Similarly, if you’re keeping a grimoire (book of recipes and incantations), a book of shadows (for spells or other magical writings), or even just the list of top secret spices in your world famous marinara sauce, you’ll have a strong motivation to make sure that nobody else gets to to the information. In this sort of a situation, there’s a variety of different ways of going about hiding or obscuring your writing, even though you’re using the same language that everybody around you speaks.

Writing without being read

Now, assuming that you’re writing a physical document, the first, and most simple, is by hiding it. You could write your marinara sauce recipe out in perfectly understandable english, but if it’s locked in a safe at the bottom of the Atlantic, nobody will be able to read it. Similarly, if you keep your diary in a locked box, or even just have a lock on the cover, it’ll be safe from prying eyes.

However, hiding the document can fail. It’s really easy to go and answer the door, leaving your journal in plain sight for any offendable parties to find. Not to mention the fact that all locks are breakable, and if the only thing between your neighbor and your marinara sauce recipe is a cloth and cardboard locking journal, your recipe is practically already stolen.

So, the next step is to somehow hide the writing itself. Things like disappearing invisible ink or ink that’s only exposed with certain light sources are wonderful at this sort of thing. Similarly, you could use some sort of steganography (hiding information within other information), maybe putting a microdot on the page, or making the first letter of every word spell out your real meaning.

These methods have their downfalls too, though. Invisible ink and microdots require specialized methods or technologies, and aren’t really practical to everyday use. Besides, sooner or later, people will notice the UV lamp on your desk and start to wonder why you keep so many blank journals. If you do a “the first letter of every word” sort of thing, then you’ll end up having to write whole paragraphs of gibberish to communicate even the smallest of concepts, and even then, it’ll betray that there’s something else going on.

You could certainly go all out and start using some sort of cipher. Switch z for a, y for b, and so on, until eventually you’ve replaced the whole alphabet with an alternative one. Perhaps you could even go deeper, using some of the more innovative sorts of cryptography out there. (For a great, understandable book on cryptography, check out Simon Singh’s The Code Book). But, encrypting your writing takes forever to encode and decode, and it’s very unlikely that you’ll ever be able to read and write in a cipher fluidly. Besides, those, too, are crackable.

Perhaps the most complex sort of cipher would be to just use the writing system (and even some vocabulary) from another language. If you’re, for instance, writing English using the Cyrillic alphabet from Russian, it’ll be pretty incomprehensible to your neighbor. However, if you come across somebody who speaks English and reads Russian, your system falls apart.

So, what option does this leave you?

Enter Cryptorthography

‘Cryptorthography’ is a word I’ve made up to describe the creation of secret writing systems. It’s a combination of cryptos (Greek for ‘hidden’), and then the linguistics term ‘orthography’, referring to the writing system and writing rules of a language. ‘orthography’ also comes from Greek, being a combination of orthos (’correct’) and graphein (’to write’)

So, how does one practice cryptorthography? It’s actually fairly simple. You just take a given language (or languages), and create a new writing system for it which only you (or a few select people) can understand. This way, you could leave even your most secret writings out on the kitchen table, but nobody would be able to understand them without a fair amount of contemplation or analysis.

By creating your own system, you’ll be able to write and read it without too much trouble, but it’ll be completely opaque to everybody else, no matter which language they speak. It’ll be far faster than coding or ciphers, and doesn’t need to be hidden or obscured to be secret, and since it’s all hand-written, it’ll be far less vulnerable to computer-based assaults because of the trouble of transcribing it into a computer.

Before you start writing all your personal secrets on your front door, it’s important to remember that, just like with the above systems of hiding your meaning, there are weaknesses and places where people could easily figure out what you mean. I’d like to discuss a few of these weaknesses that I’ve come up with, and offer some advice for how to harden your writing system against analysis.

Obscuring the obscure

The most simple way to do this would be just creating new letter forms for your language. If you just use a new symbol in the place of ‘a’, a new one in place of ‘b’, and so on, you’ll quickly have a text that’s unable to be read at first glance. The system would be easy to create, but I’d recommend against it. As soon as somebody started looking, they might well start noticing patterns. If they know (or suspect) that it’s English, they’ll start looking for certain patterns. If they see a single symbol alone, they’ll know, for instance, that it’s either ‘a’ or ‘I’. Similarly, two symbol words are far less common, and give them an inroads to further analysis.

If, on the other hand, you mix it up a bit, you’ll make their lives infinitely more difficult. For instance, if you were to use only the sounds of words and disregard how they’re written, it would instantly complicate analysis. So, instead of “rough”, you’d have ‘ruf’. “You” would become a two symbol sound (’yu’), and ‘I’ would become two symbols (’ay’). If you’d like to play it even safer, start marking all the different English vowels. With that step, you’ll confuse anybody who thinks that English only has a, e, i, o and u, and likely stop most casual inquiries.

Another good strategy is to include a few filler characters. If you include in your writing system a symbol or two that you know has no meaning, you can use it with single sound words (’a') to throw off analysis. Similarly, just dropping a few of those into random words will force people to try and find a correspondence for something that, well, just doesn’t exist.

While we’re being evil to any potential analysis, one of the advantages to creating a phonetic symbol set is that you can use it to write in other languages as well. If you start including random words in other languages, or substituting say, some Hindi word for their English equivalents, it’ll throw off any attempts to figure out what is what based on the phonology (sound rules) of a language.

For instance, somebody analyzing your system might know that if there are three consonants together in English at the start of a word, the first consonant is always an /s/ sound. Always. So, if they’ve decided what constitute vowels, and then find three consonants before one, they’ll know what your /s/ symbol is. That is, unless you use the Russian word “vsyo” (all) someplace in your text. Then, they’ll have at least two three-consonant clusters, and can’t use the phonology to work their way through it.

Using similar symbols to the existing system can be a double-edged sword: it can both help and hurt you. If your symbols are too similar, your system is far too easy to crack. However, I highly recommend using one or two symbols that are at least close to an existing symbol, however, I’d recommend assigning them a different sound. For instance, one might use a ‘v’ to represent the /k/ sound.

This has the wonderful effect of creating a cognitive mismatch between the system they’re trying to analyze and the system they’re using. As any English-literate learner of Russian will tell you, at first, it’s very tough to see a ‘p’ and hear an ‘r’ sound, even though that’s what Cyrillic does. It won’t stop them, but it’ll certainly make analysis that much more of a pain.

There are other ways to make life difficult for anybody analyzing your writing. If you write from right to left, you’ll create a great many problems for them, just as if you were to write vertically. Along those lines, if you remove spaces and familiar punctuation, it’s even more difficult, both for you and for them.

Also, remember that you don’t need to create an alphabet per se. You might create a syllabary like in Japanese, where the symbols each represent a different syllable (’ra’ might have one symbol, whereas ‘re’ would have a completely different one). Also, if you’re feeling ambitious, you could make a character set, where each word has a symbol. It’d be a great many symbols, but it’d be very difficult to crack.

Finally, as common sense dictates, throw away the key. Once you’ve created your system and learned it well, hide or destroy your handy reference guide, or else understanding your writing is as easy as looking up the symbols.

It has to make sense to somebody

However, if you spend all your time trying to make reading your system tough on other people, it’s easy to make it tough on you too. There are a few easy ways to avoid this.

Perhaps one of the toughest parts of the process is actually designing the symbols. For that, I highly recommend that you make a trip over to Omniglot, a wonderful website which discusses writing systems around the world and has lots of examples. It’s a great place to blow a few hours, and will show you all the variety of systems out there.

Once you’ve got symbols, make sure you’re combining them in a way that makes sense to you. For instance, I might use a system based on phonetics, where high vowels (like in beet and boot) are marked above the baseline, and low vowels (bat and bot) are the same symbol, but marked below the baseline. However, you can go much more personalized. If a symbol reminds you of the shape of Cape Cod, you might use it for a ‘kay’ sound. Basically, if it makes sense to you, go for it.

Finally, keep in mind the difficulty of writing the symbols you pick. Don’t use anything more complex than necessary, because it’ll only slow you down. Similarly, if you often write with a fountain pen, try to avoid symbols with right to left strokes (assuming you’re writing left-to-right). If you’re going to use this a lot, any corners you can cut now (without making it more difficult to read) will save you a massive amount of time in the future.

Your thirteen spices are safe

If you take the time to create your own writing system and take a few easy steps to harden it, you can sure that nobody will be able to casually peruse your secret recipes and writings.

However, as with all security measures, your secrets are never completely safe. All that locks, encryption, ciphers and even cryptorthography can buy you is time. If somebody has a sample of your writing system, it’s very likely that, given enough time, they’d be able to figure it out.

So, if the CIA wants to find out the secret thirteen spices, chances are, they’ll be able to. However, a little bit of cryptorthography will go a long way towards keeping your recipes mysteriously delicious.

(PS: If this sounds interesting, stay tuned. I might well be holding some sort of a contest where people create secret writing systems and then have other people try and crack them. I’ll announce more details later, but if you’re interested, leave a comment and we’ll be in touch!)

Greetings all. I know it’s been a while since my last post, but I’m definitely still here. I’m not nearly back to a place where I can have a regular posting schedule (I’m working on an MA thesis and applying to doctoral programs), but I do intend to drop in new posts periodically when I get a chance. So, in that spirit, here’s a quick post both to share a random insight, and to prove that I’m still alive.

There are a great many words that are used all the time in Academia, but seldom outside of a scholastic context. Many of these words aren’t particularly useful outside of their specific academic context. An example of a word of this type from Linguistics might be fricativization, which is the process by which a stop consonant becomes a fricative over time (for instance, /t/ goes /s/). However, there are a few words which are definitely handy even outside of linguistics and academia, but really never seem to fall out of the ivory tower into everyday use.

Sadly, in an everyday social situation when one of these terms would really work best, you’re left with two bad options.

Your first option is to just use the term in whatever context you’re in, even if the people you’re talking to might not be familiar with the term. Unless you do this with an incredible degree of social grace, you’ll seem very much like an elitist, or like you’re trying to thrust your academic background in somebody’s face. Going on to explain the term is helpful, but even then, you’re still going to seem like you’re playing professor, not hanging out with friends. That’s just not cool.

Your other option is to circumlocute, or talk around, the word. Here, you’d just describe what the word means in context, without ever actually using it. So, for instance, rather than saying “I’m a phonologist”, you might say “I study the sounds of language and the rules that go with them”. This is much more socially acceptable and doesn’t have the same air of “look at me, I’m an academic”, but it can get awkward if you want to use the word multiple times in a conversation.

So, today, I’d like to create a new option.

To Posit

One of these academic terms that I think is quite handy in everyday life is the verb “to posit”. This means, roughly, “to assume something for the basis of argument”, or in other situations, “to hypothesize”. In Linguistics, we use this term pretty frequently when trying to justify a certain analysis. Here’s an example of its usage from a recent assignment of mine on the history of Polish:

In order for this jeste —› ješcie change to have any sort of naturalness, I must first posit an isolated (at least, based on this data) vowel epenthesis [Epenthesis is the addition of a sound between two other sounds], whereby an /i/ was inserted between the the [t] and the [e] of the 2pl form (jeste —› jestie).

Ignoring the rest of the specialized vocabulary and examples, I’m basically saying that for the rest of my argument to make any sense, I’m going to hypothesize (and to a certain extent, assume) that a vowel pops up between those two sounds at some point. Here, it’s in a very academic context, but there are definitely situations in everyday life where this word could come in handy.

For instance, you’re near campus and your football obsessed school is having a home game. You’re talking with a bunch of friends before heading off to have a tasty burrito, trying to plan your route through the pandemonium:

Friend: What’s gonna be the best route to take? Do you know which streets they’re gonna block off to let the drunken fans crawl home?
You: Not a clue, but based on the past few games, we can pretty safely posit roadblocks on Euclid and Regent.
Friend: Yeah, good call, let’s try University… or… You know, let’s just order pizza.

Now, for me, “posit” really is the best verb for the job here. If you said “we can bet on roadblocks…”, it would imply a great deal more security in your guess. If you said “Let’s assume roadblocks…”, it would make it sound like there’s no other option. Finally, if you said “well, let’s hypothesize that they’ve set up roadblocks…”, you’d sound like you desperately needed to get off campus more, and further than just the burrito shop.

Let’s posit further usage by readers of this site

As many of you have already figured out, posting these obscure words on your blog isn’t really a better way to use these words in conversation. Unless your friends are all avid readers of your site (and mine aren’t, for the most part), you’ll still have to explain these words or work around them.

However, I have a wonderful dream. First, I’ll talk about “positing” on my site. Then, maybe you will, because it’s much less confrontational when you use an obscure word oline. Then, your friends friend might use it. People will start bumping into it, and more and more, it will enter the collective consciousness of society.

Eventually, this effect will cascade until my final dream is realized, and I can walk into a bar, sidle up next to a very attractive woman, and say that “given the fact that you’re talking to me, that you’re expressing interest, and most importantly, that I find you very attractive, I’m going to posit a wonderful end to this evening”.

Unfortunately, even if I use the perfect verb in the perfect context, in that situation, I still posit a quick, firm slap to the face. It’d SO be worth it.

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