Neologisms–The Red Dragon!

One should never underestimate a dragon, and especially a Dragon of Grammar. Now RT must confess that when he listed out the original Dragons of Grammar, he made a serious oversight and failed to mention the Red Dragon, the Dragon of Neologisms. Personal Circumstances Be Damned! External Reality Be Burned to a Crisp! As the Red Dragon has been reminding me, the oversight really ought to be corrected.

& RT can see that he needs a break from the sturm und drang of his recent existence; so, without further ado…

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A neologism is a new word, a word that has been recently coined. Neologisms, like dandelion seeds, happen more often than one might think. Here are some examples:

* radar (1941); warp speed (1966); meme (1976); alien space bats (1998); political correctness (1970); prequel (1958); and–last but not least–Brangelina (2005).

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How are often are neologisms generated? Without getting too scientific, RT would venture that new words (and new phrases and grammatical structures) are created all the time in the spontaneous working of the mind to convey itself to others. It may even be that this spontaneous creation is a sign of mental health and energy.

So when is a neologism accepted as a word and included in (at at least some) dictionaries? The short answer is: it is accepted when it is frequently and widely used. Some words, for instance, warp-speed, doubtless found themselves almost immediately recognized–such is the power of the TV. Others quickly come into use in a certain community–as Brangelina doubtless did in the entertainment industry–but never gain usage in the broader community of speakers. Many people simply never run across the word. Others will be accepted for a time and then fade away–anyone remember guesstimate?

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It may be that some neologisms are better at conveying meaning than others. How do we distinguish the pick of the litter(s)? Some suggestions follow:

1) A neologism should fill a need or gap in communication. Radar is a good example–it names a new technology that previously was labeled with a string of words: Radio Detection and Ranging (acronym: RADAR).

2) A neologism should express the speaker’s emotional frame of mind: “Hey, he ripped me off!” You can feel just how angry the victim of robbery is…and it just plain sounds better than “he robbed me!”

3) A neologism should be easier to pronounce than the word(s) currently used to convey a thought: for instance, zeitgeist for spirit of the times or Xerox for photocopy.

4) A neologism should be eloquent: it should enrich the sound of the language. For instance, ansible.

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So there it is, folks: our lastest (and did i mention that neologisms sometimes originate as mistakes, in this case for latest) addition to the Dragons of Grammar. A final note: Wikipedia has more information about word formation.    RT

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Image: Dragon Rouge; WikiCmns; Public Domain.

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Mexico!! (& its Native Languages)

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Yes, Mexico is home to the second-largest number of native-language speakers in the hemisphere (Peru has the largest number, at 10 mil speakers). Here are some of the Mexican stats:

• 5.4% of the population speaks a native language (6 mil spkrs total)
• Nahuatl is the most widely spoken native language (1.45 mil spkrs)
• Other widely spoken native languages: Yukatek Maya (700 k spkrs) and the Mixtec and Zapotec languages (both more than 400 k speakers)
• The National Institute of Indigenous Languages recognizes 68 linguistic groups and 364 specific varieties of the native languages
• Since its promulgation in 2003, The Law of Indigenous Language Rights has recognized these languages as national languages, enjoying the same status as Spanish in the areas where they are spoken

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Wow! And the Dragons of Grammar have volunteered to give us a bit more information about Mexico’s indigeneous languages: in northern Mexico, languages belong to one of three language families–Algonquian, Yuman-Cochimi, and Uto-Aztecan. In southernmost Mexico, the Mayan family of languages is predominant. And just to connect some of the dots in a single case–Mayan is a language family isolate, unconnected to other known language families. Mayan languages are agglutinative and polysynthetic. Verbs are marked for aspect or tense, the person of the subject, the person of the object (in the case of transitive verbs), and for plurality of person.

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Wow! All is not tea-parties in Dragon Land!   And a final note: according to AILLA, most indigenous languages in Latin America are endangered.

RT

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Map/Chart: Map of Mexican languages with More than 100,000 Speakers. WikiCmns; Public Domain.

Hangul, Literacy, and Culture–What an Alphabet Can Do For You

King Sejong the Great

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I might be skipping ahead a bit folks, but I think it’s time to introduce you to what many people consider to be the world’s most effective alphabet: Hangul.

But before I launch into a description of this alphabet’s extraordinary history and many virtues, a word of warning is in order for English speakers. Hangul was designed for speakers of Korean, a tonal language situated pretty much at the opposite end of the language spectrum from English. What makes Hangul important for the English-speaking world is 1) the story of its creation; 2) its approach to representing the sounds of language; and 3) the hope that its logical design and gradual success might serve as a model in creating an alphabet that can be used to write the major world languages, in particular, English, Chinese, Spanish, French, and Russian.

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1) History. Let’s start with the story of Hangul’s creation. King Sejong (r. 1418-1450) faced a not-unfamiliar situation in East Asia: an extremely low literacy rate resulting from the use of the Hanja, the Chinese character set, which arrived with Buddhism in Korea in the 7th century A.D. Sejong decided to create an alphabet for writing Korean that anyone could learn, with the goals of making literacy universal and strengthening Korea’s cultural identity. Overcoming opposition from court officials who did not want to lose the power their literacy gave them, the king summoned his Hall of Worthies–the eminent scholars of his time–and together the king and Hall devised the twenty-eight letters of the new alphabet, publishing the definitive text on Hangul in 1446.

The alphabet was an immediate success, allowing the poorly educated and women to read and write for the first time. But, needless to say, this social revolution prompted a backlash after Sejong’s death in 1450. Confucian scholars fought fiercely to retain the privileges their monopoly on writing had given them, and in 1504, the use of Hangul was forbidden by royal decree. The Hanja were reinstated as the sole legitimate writing system.

But at this point something remarkable happened: in defiance of the official ban, the use of Hangul among the educated class flourished. Starting in the late 1500′s, two entirely new genres of poetry, gasa and sijo, developed, and the novel written in Hangul became a major literary form. Although the use of Hangul among ordinary people disappeared, the literacy rate may nonetheless have increased, since Hangul is extremely easy to learn.

Finally, in the late 19th century, Hangul was reinstated for official use, and during the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945), the use of Hangul was encouraged as a means of separating Korea from Chinese influence. Although Japanese became the official language, a mixed Hangul-Hanja script was taught in the colonial school system; education, moreover, was mandatory, and for the first time the use of Hangul letters became universal in Korea.

Soon after independence in 1945, an official Hangul orthography was adopted, and today in both Koreas Hangul has replaced the Hanja as the common writing system.

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2) The Hangul Alphabet. Hold onto your hats, folks: the alphabet that King Sejong and his Hall of Worthies created is remarkable by any standard. In its current form, Hangul has 24 letters, of which 14 are consonants and 10 vowels.

a) Hangul is a partially featural alphabet; that is, the shapes of its letters (or letterforms) reflect the sounds they represent. It is the only featural script in widespread use.

b) Consonants are classified by the vocal organ that produces them: molar (velar), tongue (coronal), lip (bilabial), incisor (sibilant), throat (guttural), and light lip (labiodental). The letterform of each of these classes is based on a shape that is meant to resemble the vocal organ involved, with additional strokes being added to indicate the particular letter’s modification(s) from the model/basic shape.

Other consonant’ featural characteristics include a vertical top stroke over a letter to indicate a plain stop; the nonstops lack the stroke.

c) Sejong and his scholars designed the letterforms of Hangul vowels themselves; they are based on just three symbols: a dot (representing the sun), a horizontal stroke (representing the earth), and a vertical stroke (representing man). Vowel harmony was an important consideration in the design of the vowels, though VH is not as important in spoken Korean as it was during Sejong’s period.

d) Letters in Hangul that are pronounced as a syllable are not written consecutively, but are rather grouped together in blocks. The syllable blocks have three advantages: the letters within them are arranged in the block in an order reflecting the sequence of sounds in the syllable;  the blocks save space in writing and printing; and the blocks are beautiful.

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Of course, there’s more to the alphabet than the brief description above covers; to get an better idea of the script, study this chart of jamo, or Hangul letters:

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3) Modeling a Future Universal Alphabet on Hangul. A writing reform based on the development of Hangul would go far towards  increasing literacy and bringing cultures across the globe closer together. Here are some of the Hangul principles that one might use to create this alphabet:

a) A strict adherence to phonetic letters;

b) A letterform design that reflects that vocal organs used in producing the sound;

c) A uniform method of marking the same kind of modification to a class’s basic letterform;

d) A logical arrangement of the letters by class; and

e) The continued use of current alphabets until their use become burdensome.

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Photos: Top: Public Statue of King Sejong in Seoul, Korea. Author: David Hepworth. WikiCmns. CC 2.0 Generic. Bottom: Papers printed with Hangul letters. Author: jared. WikiCmns. CC 2.0 Generic.

Tea Time with the Dragons of Grammar (A Drama)

Tea Time with the Dragons of Grammar

(A Romantical Comedy in Three Acts)

Just when you thought the Dragons of Grammar couldn’t get any sillier, here we are to prove you wrong. To be sure, there will be a certain element of competition (and perhaps even a little back-scratching) in the conversation that follows, but all the dragons have promised to be on their best manners, so we can expect to see more cucumber sandwiches perched precariously on claws than dead-dragon looks (and if you don’t know what a DDL is, how lucky for you! )

A. Our Mise-en-Scene

So where were we? Ah yes, imagine we’re inside a large, airy cave with a view–a dramatic one, of the ocean and exotic lands far away. Next, let’s reintroduce our company of grammarian daredevils: 1) Morphology (the Chocoholic Dragon); 2) Syntax (the Aviator Dragon); 3) Phonology (the Absent-Minded Dragon); 4) Phonetics (the Dragon with a Tape-Recorder); 5) Semantics (the Acupuncturist); and 6) Pragmatics (the Fuzzy Dragon).

And lest any of our readers have (gasp!) forgotten the Dragons’ respective bailiwicks, here they are: a) Morphology: the classification of word- and language-types; b) Syntax: the construction of sentences and languages; c) Phonology: the link between sound and meaning; d) Phonetics: the mechanics of language; e) Semantics: the shades of meaning; and f) Pragmatics: the real-world approach to language, or the poetry of language).

B. Act One: A Critical Question!

Our dragons are all seated in a circle, each holding his (or her!) cup of tea. A large, elaborate oak coffee-table sits in the center of the circle; on the table is an ornate Victorian tea-service, including scones, frittatas (a modern concession), six very large porcelain pots of tea, and enough cookies to give even an active sweet-tooth second thoughts. Morphology (or Morfilene) is wearing PJs and a bathrobe, with curlers in her hair and a large box of Godiva chocolates on her lap; Syntax (or Capt. Sopwith)  is wearing a leather aviator jacket, a white silk scarf, and a pair of goggles; Phonology (or Prof. GrumpyChuckle) is wearing a tweed jacket, a large pair of round glasses, a rumpled white shirt with a rather natty plaid bow-tie, and has red string tied around one finger–he is supposed to be our process monitor!!); Phonetics (or Ranger Eagle-Ear) is dressed in a no-nonsense khaki uniform and dark-brown field-hat; Semantics (or Dr. Silverneedle) is wearing light-blue scrubs, sandals, and a yellow ribbon in her dark hair); and Pragmatics (or Ms. CoolStuff) is wearing designer jeans, a mohair sweater, and bangle earrings. (Next to GrumpyChuckle is an enormous standing gong).

1. RT starts the ball rolling by asking: How are the Dragons of Grammar related to each other? A sensitive question this, and accompanied by many an arched eyebrow, many a set of pursed lips. No one wants to be the first to make a comment, and some minutes pass before Ranger Eagle-Ear pipes up and says: “It all starts with a sound! The important thing is to have a tape-recorder with you.” Capt. Sopwith snorts at the remark and says, “Hogwash! You must have a plan first, a plan!” Things look like they might degenerate into a shouting match, but Ms. Coolstuff intervenes with a bright smile and “Get over yourselves! The man didn’t ask us who was first; he wanted to know how we’re related.” Sopwith and Eagle-Ear momentarily look indisposed (having failed to think of a sharp retort), and then the group sinks back into silence.

2. At length, Prof. GrumpyChuckle restarts the conversation with “By gosh and golly, there is no real distinction between us; we exist as a team, a department, everyone acting in harmony.” Several Bronx cheers greet this remark, and GrumpyChuckle reminds the dragons that this is supposed to be a polite conversation. More Bronx cheers.

3. A fragile silence follows, soon broken by Morfilene, who says, “What you are obviously failing to see is that grammar is An Art, involving taste and the ability to understand distinctions, say, the difference between a Royal Coconut Bon-Bon and a Cherry Explosion Truffle.” Morfilene temporarily disappears behind puffs of steam blown at her by the others (who want some of the chocolates she is so zealously hoarding).

Indeed, tempers are beginning to fray, so RT thinks it the better part of valor to call a time-out. The curtain descends.

C. Act Two: A Desperate Duel!

The curtain rises on our dragons engrossed in an appalling spectacle: Eagle-Eye and Sopwith are dueling with sabres; they have offended each other’s honor, and as gentlemen dragons, they must fight to the death! All eyes are rivetted on the pair as they dance around each other, assuming threatening poses and exchanging DDLs. Then Eagle-Eye dashes in and scores a direct hit! Green dragon blood dribbles out from Sopwith circles round and slashes EE’s arm. But it is too late; EE takes his sabre in his left hand and rushes at Sopwith, slashing away. Sopwith is overwhelmed, hit multiple times, and crys out “Forsooth! I am struck a grievious blow!” before falling to the ground. But GrumpyChuckle saves the day, banging on his gong so loud that EE’s ears explode with ringing, he loses balance, and falls to the floor, unconscious. Silverneedle (who has always had a crush on Sopwith) rushes to his side, and before long her magic needles have revived him. Morfilene (who has always had passionate feelings for EE), feeds him her secret hemp-and-soybean bon-bons, which heal his ears of all hurt.

Bravo, GrumpyChuckle! The curtain descends.

D. Act Three: All is Fair in Love and Food!

Our curtain rises on a tragical scene–our dragons are divided into two camps, one on either side of the stage. The tea table and service are gone, as are Morfilene’s chocolates.

RT’s final question: If you had a choice, which would you rather do: go to a lavish banquet or read a book on grammar?

An uproar ensures, as dragons raise their hands, jump up and down, and make faces at the opposing side–the sole exception being Morfilene, who rolls her eyeballs. At last she jumps up and shouts down everyone else. “Where are my chocolates! I want my chocolates!”

In response, Eagle-Eye roars out: “Balderdash! Why are you worried about food when more important matters are at stake?”

But now CoolStuff is getting angry: “Why do dragons waste time on duels? If we change grammar, we can change the way people think and get rid of this nonsense !” To which Eagle-Eye huffs and puffs and says: “And how are we going to do that?” GrumpyChuckle then proceeds to bang on his gong, an enormous sound, and everyone sits down.

By way of reward, GC waves to unseen lizard helpers, and they run onto the stage with the table, service, and a new supply of tea, sandwiches, cookies–and chocolates! A few satisfied minutes follow as the dragons sip and munch away. Then Silverneedle gets bored and starts throwing crumbs at Sopwith (he never does pay any attention to her!). Sopwith responds with a volley of strawberries, and before GrumpyChuckle can do anything, the tea party has degenerated into a food fight. As four of the dragons chase each other around the room, Morfilene holds on tightly to her chocolates and GrumpyChuckle bangs on his gong. Exeunt the four dragons stage left,  followed by GrumpyChuckle and Morfilene.

Finis

(and the Dragons of Grammar will be back to provide further insights–and settle their differences)

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Photos: Top:  Tea Colors; WikiCmns; User, Haneburger; Public Domain. Bottom: Tea Cup With Dragon Motif; WikiCmns; User: Yunomi; Public Domain.

Suprasegmentals

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The days (and leaves) are falling fast in (mostly sunny) Martinsburg, and RT has been busy arranging further linguistic and grammatical explorations for friends and followers… in particular, set aside a day on your calendar for Tea-Time with the Dragons of Grammar, which promises to be a most illuminating (and mischievous) event…but for those who can’t wait for the latest hit from the Dragons, here is something feisty and fiery.

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In linguistics, a segment is any discrete unit that can be identified in the production or reception of human speech (for instance, a phone or phoneme). Suprasegmentals are phonemes that cannot be easily broken down into segments. For instance, the segments of sign language are visual–hands, face, eyes, and body gesture. Vowels and consonants are also segments, that is, discrete speech units.

On the other hand, some speech units do not exist independently from others; these are the suprasegmentals, and include such items as tone and secondary articulations (for instance, co-articulated consonants). Suprasegmentals are in essence additional and simultaneous speech information that augments or completes a speaker’s meaning or articulation.

Just imagine Mandarin Chinese without its tones; the language has been robbed of most of its articulation. That’s how important suprasegmentals are.

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As far as charting and scribing these erudite beasts, patience is in order. For English speakers, stress is a familiar concept (especially if you’re a poet) and helps structure the sound of our speech. On the other hand, no adult English speaker will be able to master the subtleties of the Chinese tones. The other marks fall somewhere in the middle in terms of familiarity…but more on that from RT in the next little while…

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Chart: WikiCmns; Authors: Grendelkhan, Nohat; Licence: CC 3.o Unported.

Pragmatics: the Fuzzy Dragon

Poets thrive on ambiguity; without it, there would be no simile, no metaphor, no pleasure of discovering hidden connections. But for the rest of the species, fuzziness can be a headache.

Consider a sentence as straightforward as “I love you.” Depending on the situation, tone of voice, and accompanying body gestures, it could mean everything from abiding affection and companionship to the end of a relationship!

Pragmatics is the study of holistic communication, and can help disambiguate people’s messages.

Other ways to think of pragmatics include 1) The study of the speaker’s meaning, not focusing on the phonetic or grammatical form of an utterance, but instead on what the speaker’s intentions and beliefs are; 2) The study of the meaning in context, and the influence that a given context can have on the message. It requires knowledge of the speaker’s identities, and the place and time of the utterance; and 3) The study of implicatures, i.e. the things that are communicated even though they are not explicitly expressed.

Hmmm. If you’re beginning to think that Pragmatics is a broad field (and difficult to pin down exactly), consider this–it has its own category in Wikipedia. In this category, we find such items as abstraction (the tendency of a word for an specific kind of thing to eventually represent a broader concept–i.e., “through” comes from a Gothic word meaning “gate); aizuchi (the frequent interjections during conversation that indicate the listener is following the speaker); gradience (the degree to which a speaker claims that his or her statement is true); an illucutionary act (in which a speech act of one kind–such as question–can stand for another kind of speech act–such as “Can you pass the salt?” meaning “Please pass the salt.”); and politeness maxims (which describe the ways that we make our conversation more polite or sympathetic).

WoW! I’m beginning to feel a little fuzzy. I think that what this all boils down to is that pragmatics is the subtlest of the dragons of grammar. Here we are concerned with getting behind the mask of ordinary speech to a speaker’s real meaning and attitude. Reflection and a knack for fine distinctions can be required.

The abstractions of grammar do exist in the real world.

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Image: 18th century Korean ink and color painting. WikiCmns. Public Domain.

Language is the Art of Community

I’m sure most people have heard some variant of this before, but it bears repeating: language is the primary means by which we establish our identities and humanity with other people. You can show up looking like a hairy stone-age guy who badly needs a shower, but if you reel off a quote from, say, Romeo and Juliet, at least some people will be willing to forgive you your appearance.

In other words, nothing says more about you than the way you speak.

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The thought may have particular importance as the school year revs up. It has always astounded me how little attention we pay to language skills in the United States. Everyone is worried about buying new computers and building science classrooms, but no one seems to understand that unless we cultivate English and a knowledge of languages generally, our community’s cohesion is at stake. It’s not simply a matter of being understood, it’s also a matter of what you know and the impression you make.

And it’s clear that we aren’t trying hard enough: when many colleges teach their Freshmen remedial English, our High Schools are failing to teach even basic language skills. Not to mention things like Latin and Greek, which not only help students develop a better mastery of their everyday speech, but also open up the possibility of reading the gospels, Thucydides, and Cicero in their original languages.

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I know that many schools are maxed out just trying to integrate students whose families have come to America from all over the globe, but let’s not forget that it pays to get our young people past the basics and give them some mastery of the culture that they are inheriting.       RT

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Image: The Rosetta Stone; WikiCmns; Christian Theological Seminary; Public Domain.

Semantics: Can You Make it Sting Some More?

The Dragons of Grammar have been restive lately, sending out long plumes of smoke from their remote, rocky caves; making the occasional exploratory flight around the islands that they inhabit; sending me little love notes scratched on the back of any handy rock; and generally wanting to know why I’ve forgotten them.

Well, man does not live by blog alone, and the real world (American style) has been intruding on my thoughts of late. Prescription costs, much overdue maintenance on my apartment, and some trekking about in the thankfully cool Spring to meet old friends are among the items that have kept my attention elsewhere; so, I offer apologies to my scaly coterie!

And in particular, there’s that multifarious beast called Semantics, which is the study of meaning in signifiers, which include words, phrases, signs, and symbols.

1) In the context of the humble word, for instance, semantics draws the distinction between denotation and connotation–between a word’s literal meaning and the emotions and other meanings that the word suggests (and please note, this is a distinction understood by poets practically from the moment of birth ).

In other words, a word is never just a word, but a group of meanings and feelings triggered by a principle meaning. Or we could say that a word, once learned, does not remain static, but grows as we acquire its cultural associations and individual emotional responses to its use. One way to understand this is to think of how an acupuncture point works–my acupuncturist having pointed out to me on more than one occasion that there is no single point that she aims for, but an area about the size of quarter. You know you’ve hit pay dirt, she says, when the patient says, “Gee, that stings! Can you make it sting some more?”

Let’s look at this simile more closely. Suppose that when we learn a new word, we do not activate a single neuron, but a cluster of neurons. At the center is the neuron(s) containing the principle word; surrounding it are neurons that will contain closely related words. For example, a principle word might be “big,” and associated words, “large,” “giant,” “great,” “important,” and “formidable.” Thus, when a person hears any of these words, the entire cluster of meanings is stimulated.

We can say more. The needle of meaning also triggers an emotional response. Somehow, the cluster of a word’s meanings is associated with more basic emotions. I can imagine our meaning neurons lying on top (and perhaps grows out) of the primordial emotion neurons–which in turn may lie on top of even more primordial neurons associated with action. Thus, words can be seen as the topmost board of a game of 3-D chess (Mr. Spock will win the game, of course).

For instance, a person hears the word “bully.” A cluster of meanings is triggered, most negative, but which may include Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party. Depending on how much you’ve been thinking about early 20th Century American politics lately, the word may frighten you and perhaps stimulate a “fight or flight” response. Wow!

2) Then there is the issue of the way that meanings (denotations, in this case) relate to the sounds that represent them: a) homonyms (same sound, different meanings, as in row the boat and a row of cars in a parking lot); b) synonyms (different sounds, same meaning, as in “buy” or “purchase” the tomatoes); and c) antonyms (opposite and mutually exclusive meanings, such as male and female). And how about that curious critter, metaphor, in which one idea simply stands for another, as in “grasp your meaning.”

3) I won’t hide from you the fact that semantics can be a rather abstruse dragon, often bent over a book with its reading glasses perched neatly near its eyes ; its remit includes such daunting concepts as parsing (the diagramming of sentences in natural languages); truth values (the relationship of a proposition to truth); and thematic relations  (the role that a noun phrase plays in regard to the verb in its sentence).  But it is best to remember that semantics is above all a gentle creature, which easily yields up its mysteries and meanings…and invites further explorations of the amazing assortment of ways that sound and meaning interact.

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OK, team leader RT admits to being a wee bit tired at the moment–it’s time to bring our visit to rocky locales to a close for the day. But have no fear, though we’ve explored many of the amazing beasts associated with grammar, there are still more to come. Stay tuned!  

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Photo: Chinese Barefoot Doctor Performing Acupuncture; author, D. Henrioud, World Health Organization; WikiCmns; Public Domain.

Esperanto

 

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This is a brief note about Esperanto, one of the oldest and perhaps the most widely spoken auxiliary language.

Esperanto was published in 1887 by L.L. Zamenhof, an ophtholmologist from Bialystok, which at that time was part of the Russian Empire. Its vocabulary is taken mostly from the Romance languages; its word structure is agglutinative (i.e., it forms its words by adding affixes to a word base); and its words consist of few word-pieces or morphemes (i.e., it is an isolating language). It is written in a modified version of the Latin Alphabet that uses a one-sound-one-letter principle.

My main point in writing is to introduce some of the distinctions used to classify languages. And Esperanto’s comparatively wide use means that those who study it tie into a large community of speakers (up to 2 million native speakers, by some estimates).

& for what it’s worth, here’s my favorite word in Esperanto: lingvo (language). 8)

RT

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Image: Official flag of Esperanto; WikiCmns; Public Domain.

Phonetics: Surf’s Up!

 

Phonetics: this is the most scientific of the Dragons of Grammar. It is the study of the sounds that people make–the study of the sounds themselves, not of the way that the mind forms or breaks them down for their meaning. Phonetics is the foundation of grammar, since it looks at the raw data that language is built of and the way that it is produced by the mouth, travels through the air, and is received by the ear.

Phonetics is broken down into three subfields: 1) Articulatory phonetics (the way that the lungs, throat, and mouth produce sounds); 2) Acoustic phonetics (the physical properties of human speech); and 3) Auditory phonetics (the way that the ear receives speech sounds). Another way to think of this is that phonetics breaks down the path of speech from lung to mouth to ear into three parts. And there’s no getting around it, folks: we’re down in the basement of grammar, peering into distant caves and tunnels, coming up occasionally to surf on streams of air.

Hmmm. Not everyone is into spelunking or surfing. But phonetics introduces distinctions that are vital to fully understanding the International Phonetic Alphabet–distinctions that make the IPA unintelligible at first glance.

So Team Leader RT says: grab your waterproof outfits, find that old handpick and rope in the attic, and borrow a surf board if you don’t already own one!!

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Let’s look at some details of the phonetics subfields:

1) Articulatory. Speech begins with an airflow generated in our lungs (and thus called pulmonic) and directed up through the trachea (or windpipe) into the larynx (or voicebox). The larynx manipulates the airflow to produce volume and pitch (that is, how loud and how squeeky or rumbling our words sound). This basic sound then travels through the vocal tract where it is further shaped by the pharynx, the mouth, tongue, and lips. In the vocal tract, the sound is refined into consonants or vowels and acquires stress and tone. At this point, the sound has become a word, ready for passage through the air to its audience. Hurray!!

Fundamental Frequencies

2) Acoustic. Once a word has been spoken, it exists as a series of waves travelling through the air. Any wave has height (or amplitude) and length (duration). Any series of waves has frequency and resonance. Frequency (or frequencies, since more than one is always involved) is the number of times the wave occurs per unit of time; resonance is the tendency of waves to bunch or scrunch up at certain frequencies–so that these parts of the wave series are louder.

Waves can be deceptive–on paper they look well-defined and predictable, but in fact are loaded with nuances like voice quality and prosody. These details can reveal a speaker’s emotional state, indicate the kind of communication being made (e.g., statement, question, or command), and the presence of irony or sarcasm. People have learned to pack their sounds with meanings and implications.

3) Auditory. To decipher the bundle of intricate information contained in sound waves moving through air, the ear has developed an equally intricate system of hearing. The human ear is divided into the outer, middle, and inner ears. The outer ear (the part of the ear protruding out from the head, also called the “pinna,” and the auditory canal as far as the outer layer of the eardrum, or tympanic membrane) helps collect the physical sounds of speech and amplify them. The middle ear (located behind the eardrum) consists of three bones (the maleus, the incus, and the stapes) which successively transmit the motions sensed by the ear drum to the inner ear. In the middle ear, one of the more amazing things in hearing happens: the energy of speech, which has up til this point existed in air, will now be carried in the liquid-filled inner ear. The inner ear consists of the semi-circular canals (which enable us to maintain our balance); the vestibule (which transmits and equalizes the energy waves transmitted to it via the stapes to the SCC and  a membrane called the round window); and the cochlea, which contains sensory filaments that, when moved by the pressure waves transmitted from the round window, fire, sending neurosignals via the cochlear nerve to the brain.

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Intricate it is, but the essential elements of speech and hearing are well understood, enabling the creation of speech recognition systems that accurately transcribe normal speech into digital information about 95 percent of the time. But the key word here is normal; variation in accent, volume, and local acoustic conditions can throw these systems off. So robots that understand what we say probably won’t show up for some time.

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Whew! The expedition is over, and we have travelled where few (consciously) have ventured. Poets, however wedded to the written word, should always bear in mind the immense variety and subtleties of spoken language, a resource that will take their verses to new and amazing places.     RT

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Images. Surfer: Marine Kris Burgmeister surfing in Hawaii, WikiCmns, Public Domain; Speech Passages & Cavities, WikiCmns, Public Domain; Fundamental Frequencies, WikiCmns, Public Domain; Diagram of Ear, Author–Chittka L. Brockmann, WikiCmns, CC 2.5.