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.

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.

The Novgorod Codex

A page from the Novgorod Codex

A palimpsest is a writing surface that has been written on at least twice; the original text has been erased (at least partially) and the new text added on top. Usually the writing surface is parchment, which is made from animal skin and therefore more durable than paper or papyrus–though palimpsests written on papyrus have survived.

This seems straightforward: until modern times, writing materials were scarce and expensive, and authors would often wash away (with milk and oat bran) an unimportant text and use the “blank” surface for their writing project. The problems (or challenges, if you prefer) start when the overwritten material (the “underscript”) has not been completely erased and is in fact important.

 

In case readers might think that palimpsests are rare, wholesale destruction of old volumes has occurred in periods during which new writing materials were extremely expensive and hard to find: after the collapse of the Roman Empire, for example, so many biblical manuscripts were overwritten that the practice was forbidden by ecclesiastical order in 691.

 

And then there are the important manuscripts that exist only as overwritten material–the Archimedes Palimpsest is a famous instance, as is the Sinaiticus Palimpsest.

 

In the past, the deciphering of underscripts was mainly a matter of a keen eye and discipline. But new technologies, such as ultraviolet photography and the manipulation of digitized images, are making it possible to read very faint underscripts. In fact, the process of decipherment can be seen as emblematic of the scholarly struggle to reconstruct lost versions of stories through analysis of the newer materials that replaced them (as was done to reconstruct the Q Gospel from its surviving text in the Synoptic Gospels).

 

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Some double palimpsests survive–the writing surface has been overwritten twice–and we now possess a hyper-palimpsest, the Novgorod Codex–which consists of three wooden tablets covered with wax that has been overwritten hundreds of times.

 

Discovered in July 2000 in Novgorod, one of the oldest cities in Russia (first mentioned, 859 A.D.) the Codex dates from the first quarter of the 11th Century and perhaps even from the end of the 10th, making it the oldest text composed  in East Slavic discovered so far. Thus the Codex is contemporary with the reign of Grand Prince Yaroslavl, who controlled both Novgorod and Kiev, and reflects the society of Russia during the time of its Christianization (official date, 988).

 

To provide further historical perspective, Russia’s conversion to Christianity occurred during the reign of Emperor Basil II, the last great emperor of the middle Byzantine Empire; he brought Byzantine power to its apex and, intensely devout, encouraged missionary efforts in areas lying north of the Black Sea. The Byzantines were Orthodox Christians, but their missionaries competed with adherents of Bogomilism, a gnostic faith which had its origins in the Balkans during the 10th Century.

 

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The uppermost level of writing in the Codex (the so-called “basic text”) records the text of Psalms 75 and 76, written in the medieval dialect of Novgorod. The basic text has been read without difficulty, but the levels underneath it have presented a challenge unlike anything ever encountered during the decipherment of a palimpsest. Leading the efforts at decipherment is the linguist Andrey Zalizniak, Russia’s foremost expert on the Novgorod dialect. Zalizniak believes that the Codex contains traces of thousands of texts, written over a period of decades.

 

Zalizniak tackles the seemingly impossible challenge of reading the underscripts of the Codex by dividing the Codex into letter-sized sectors and searching for individual symbols in each section. After identifying letters at a certain position, he moves to the next sector and reconstructs its letters. In this way, he builds up “symbol chains” that eventually grow into words and sentences. Linguist Izabel Vallatton has repeated this process behind Zalizniak, confirming some of his shorter chains (20-30 symbols long).

 

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Here is a partial list of the texts that Zalizniak has deciphered so far: 1) numerous psalms, 2) the beginning of the Apocalypse of John, 3) a so-far unknown tetralogy, From Paganism to Christ, 4) a fragment of the unknown text, Instructions of Alexander of Laodicea on Forgiveness of Sins, and 5) a fragment of the unknown text, Spiritual Instruction of the Father and the Mother to the Son. These last two texts Zalizniak believes were written by the schismatic monk Issakiy, who followed the teachings of a self-proclaimed prophet Alexander, who claimed God-like powers of salvation. The tenor of these teachings is Bogomil. Issakiy is apparently the author of the Codex, and it seems likely from some of the writing uncovered that he converted pagan Slavs to gnostic Christianity.

 

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Why might any of this matter? Bogomilism survived into the 17th Century in the Balkans and has been linked to the development of Catharism in the Provence in the 13th Century. Byzantium went into sharp decline after the death of Basil II, but its missionaries prevailed in their struggle with Gnosticism and Russia today is Orthodox. Worth noting is the fact that the sack of Constantinople in 1204 occurred during the pontificate of Innocent III, who authorized the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars. In short, the struggle between mainstream Christianity and Gnosticism lasted centuries and has had significant political and cultural consequences. The Novgorod Codex offers us a window onto an early chapter of that struggle.

 

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Image: WikiCommons; Public Domain.

 

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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.

Extinctions

The thought of language extinction can bring frightening images to mind: whole populations defeated, oppressed, and eventually destroyed or driven into exile, taking their words with them. But not all language extinctions happen in such a violent way, and some languages survive and reappear again in everyday speech despite intense persecution (e.g., Hebrew). What seems to be most important to language survival is the degree to which a language is necessary to conducting daily business. Next most important is whether the power elite speaks it. Finally, the use of a language in liturgy can preserve it–once again, Hebrew is an example, as are Latin, Old Church Slavonic, and Sanskrit.

When a language does disappear in speech, its written record can preserve important stories, and, above all, the history of the language’s community. 

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Here are some extinct languages you may not have heard of (I hadn’t–and note that all are European), accompanied by stories and history:

1) Shaudit. A Romance language spoken by Jewish people living in southern France from at least the 10th century A.D. It is unclear whether Shaudit developed from Judeo-Latin, evolved independently after Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, or owes it origins to the Jewish exegetical school at Narbonne. Shaudit declined rapidly during the Inquisition, and the last known speaker, Arman Lunel, died in 1977.

2) Sicel. Spoken by the Sicels, one of the three pre-Latin and -Punic tribes of Sicily. The language is of Indo-European origin, and scholars think that they arrived in Sicily after 1000 B.C. and introduced the use of iron to the island. The Odyssey mentions them, and Thucydides notes that they may originally have inhabited central Italy. After the arrival of Greek colonists in Sicily, the Sicel tribe began to decline, and sometime after 400 B.C. the language died out.

3) Cumbric. A Celtic language spoken in Hen Ogleth, the Old North of England and southern Scotland. Associated with the Kingdom of Strathclyde, Cumbric died out in the 12th century A.D. By the way, speakers of Cumbric were P-Celts.

4) Norn. A north German language spoken in the Shetland Islands and Caithness. After the Shetlands were transferred from Norway to Scotland in the 14th century, the language began to die out. Walter Sutherland, from Shaw in Unst, was possibly Norn’s last speaker. He died in 1850.

5) Auregnais. A dialect of Norman spoken on Alderney, one of the English Channel Islands. By 1880, the local children has stopped speaking it among themselves. Population movement and official neglect have been cited as reasons for the language’s extinction.

6) Tartessian. A language spoken in the southwestern Iberian peninsula (Spain) before the Romans secured the peninsula and Latin became its common language. Tartessian, which was spoken from about the 7th century B.C. to the 1st century A.D., is an unclassified language and one of the paleohispanic languages.

7) Meyra. Merya was spoken be the Merya tribe, an important pre-Slavic community centered around Lake Nero near Yaroslavl in northwest Russia. Merya was a Uralic language, related to Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian, and Meryan religious sites, such as sacred stones and groves, continued in use for feasts much longer than other such sites in the region. It is believed that the Slavs peacefully assimilated the Merya about 1000 A.D., and Yaroslav the Wise founded Yaroslavl on the site of a Meryan shrine where a sacred bear was kept.

8) Galindan. A little known language, spoken in Poland until the 14th century, Galindan was a member of the Baltic language group,  and thus related to Lithuanian, Latvian, and the extinct language Old Prussian. The Galindans were known to Ptolemy, and medieval Russians have left a written reference to them. No inscriptions in Galindan are known. Possibly, like their neighbors, the Old Prussians, the Galindans were warlike and very difficult to convert.

9) Messapian. Few inscriptions written in Messapian have survived, making its study and classification difficult. What is known is that this language was spoken in southeastern Italy (Apulia) and died out about the 1st century B.C. If this language belongs to the Illyrian language group, as some scholars believe, its inscriptions would be the only writing found so far for this language group. Some Greek mythographers noted that the ancestor of the Messapian-speaking tribes was the son of Dedalus.

10) Anglo-Norman. The variety of Old Norman spoken by the English court after William the Conqueror deposed the House of Wessex. This language, one of the northern French dialects (or langues d’oil), is the missing link between continental French and the many words that found their way into English after the Norman Conquest. For instance, chou-caboge-cabbage. And the AN “captain” retained the /k/ sound not found in French. So it turns out that the educated English elite were trilingual in medieval times, speaking AN, Latin, and English. After English replaced AN as the language of law and in sessions of Parliament in the mid-14th century, the use of Anglo-Norman dwindled away–English (in its radically altered Middle English form) had remained the language of commerce and the common people. But the most colloquial of the many AN dialects contributed to the development of early Modern English (in general use by 1500) to such an extent that it might be truer to say that they were absorbed into everyday English usage. Readers should nevertheless note: modern English remains a Germanic language.

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Photo: Etruscan Gold Pendant, 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.

Mighty Mice Redux–the IPA for English Speakers

 

Council of Mice, Hokusai, 18th century

The most amazing thing about language may not be its diversity of sound; it may be its precision. The multiplicity of sounds and meanings that we produce are made possible by a skill that we start learning the day we are born and that continues to mature thoughout life.

I enjoy poking fun at linguistics, its practitioners, and the terms they invent, but, to be fair, the subject is vast and not without its political ramifications. For the most part, it is not lack of knowledge or ideas that holds back the improvement of language skills, but the widespread misconception that language skills are not important (and that anyone can master them easily).

And here, at least, is one way to make the task of mastering the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) easier: an IPA chart for English speakers. (the Dragons of Grammar strike again!) Enjoy learning more about the various critters and crawlies that make up human speech!

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IPA Chart for English Speakers

(Words in small capitals are the standard lexical sets. Words in the lexical sets bath and cloth are given two transcriptions, respectively one with /ɑː/ and one with /æ/, and with /ɒ/ and /ɔː/).

Consonants IPA Examples b buy, cab d die, cad ð thy, breathe, father dʒ giant, badge, jam f phi, caff, fan ɡ (ɡ)[1] guy, bag h high, ahead j yes, yacht k sky, crack l lie, sly, gal m my, smile, cam n nigh, snide, can ŋ sang, sink, singer ŋɡ finger, anger θ thigh, math p pie, spy, cap r rye, try, very[2] s sigh, mass ʃ shy, cash, emotion t tie, sty, cat, atom tʃ China, catch v vie, have w wye, swine hw why[3] z xi, zoo, has ʒ pleasure, vision, beige[4] Marginal consonants x ugh, loch, Chanukah[5] ʔ uh-oh /ˈʌʔoʊ/

Vowels IPA Full vowels … followed by R[6][7] ɑː palm, baht, father, bra ɑr start, bard, barn, snarl, star (also /ɑːr./) ɒ lot, pod, song, doll[8] ɒr moral, forage æ trap, pad, shall, ban ær barrow, marry aɪ price, ride, file, fine, pie[9] aɪər fire (/aɪr./)[7] aʊ mouth, loud, foul, down, how aʊər hour (/aʊr./)[7] ɛ dress, bed, fell, men[10] ɛr error, merry[11] eɪ face, made, fail, vein, pay ɛər square, scared, scarce, cairn, Mary (/eɪr./)[12][7] ɪ kit, lid, fill, bin ɪr mirror, Sirius iː fleece, seed, feel, mean, sea ɪər near, beard, fierce, serious (/iːr./) ɔː thought, Maud, dawn, fall, straw[13] ɔr north, born, for, aural (/ɔːr./) ɔɪ choice, void, foil, coin, boy ɔɪər loir, coir (/ɔɪr./)[7] oʊ goat, code, foal, bone, go[14] ɔər force, boar, more, oral (/oʊr./)[15] ʊ foot, good, full, woman ʊr courier uː goose, food, fool, soon, chew ʊər boor, moor, tourist (/uːr./)[16] juː cued, cute, mule, tune, queue[17] jʊər cure ʌ strut, mud, dull, gun[18] ʌr borough, hurry ɜr nurse, word, girl, fern, furry (/ɝː/)[19] Reduced vowels ə Rosa’s, a mission, comma ər letter, perform (also /ɚ/)[19] ɨ roses, emission[20] (either ɪ or ə) ən button ɵ omission[21] (either oʊ or ə) əm rhythm ʉ beautiful, curriculum ([jʉ])[22] (either ʊ or ə) əl bottle i happy, serious[23] (either ɪ or iː) ᵊ, ⁱ (vowel is frequently dropped: nasturtium)   Stress Syllabification IPA Examples IPA Examples ˈ intonation /ˌɪntɵˈneɪʃən/,[24] battleship /ˈbætəlʃɪp/[25] . shellfish /ˈʃɛl.fɪʃ/, selfish /ˈsɛlf.ɨʃ/ nitrate /ˈnaɪ.treɪt/, night-rate /ˈnaɪt.reɪt/ hire /ˈhaɪər/, higher /ˈhaɪ.ər/ moai /ˈmoʊ.aɪ/, Windhoek /ˈvɪnt.hʊk/ Vancouveria /væn.kuːˈvɪəriə/[26] ˌ

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Mice Bury the Cat, Russian, 18th century

Both images: WikiCmns, Public Domain;

Chart: WikiP, CC3.0, Author: Wikipedia: IPA for English