Putting the Fun Back into Phonology
Phonology is the study of the sounds of a language, the smallest unit of which is a phoneme. The study involves the details of the sounds: how they’re articulated in speakers’ mouths and their acoustic features as measured in audio processing gear. Every language has its own system of phonemes, where small differences between similarly articulated sounds make the difference between one word and another.
For instance, in classical phonetic analysis of English, the two phonemes /d/ and /t/ are differentiated in that the former is a voiced consonant and the latter is unvoiced. Otherwise, they are articulated in the same places in the mouth by identical tongue placement (against the gum ridge behind the front teeth). But choosing the voiced version gives us the word “leader”, whereas the unvoiced one gives us the word “liter”.
English has about 20 consonant sounds and approximately 24 more-or-less distinct vowel sounds, give or take a few, depending on the regional variant of the language you’re talking about. But we don’t have an alphabet with 44 letters. The written language is infamous for its poverty of vowels.
Now, the vowel sounds included in the 24 also contain diphthongs, which are two vowel sounds blended together as a single unit, such as the “ow” in “house”, the “ay” in “day”, or the “eye” in “why”. But English orthography is a trainwreck of accrued spelling conventions based on historic pronunciations that no longer exist. There’s no one-to-one correspondence between spelling and sound. So language learners have to learn the spelling of words independent of their pronunciation in many cases, although generalized rules of thumb apply.
This phonetic mess is one reason that perfectly literate English speakers have a difficult time conveying unique pronunciations—such as regionalisms or idiosyncratic pronunciations—using the standard alphabet. Anything accurate would have to rely on using the International Phonetic Alphabet with its loads of unique characters representing unique sounds consistently. The IPA represents all the sounds that have been found to exist in all the world’s languages.
Dr. Geoff Lindsey does a competent job of explaining the fundamentals of English phonology in this video:
If you haven’t explored linguistics, you might find some of the details discussed rather surprising and entertaining—maybe even slightly controversial. Part of this has to do with how we learned sounds and their spellings in the earliest years of schooling. Spelling pronunciation is a thing, as the orthography influences how we speak, and not only the other way around.
It’s the phonology-orthography differences that permit goofy puns like the one in the title of this post, in fact.
Not sure exactly how I ended up down this rabbit trail, but here we are. The presentation I found to be quite good in the way it shows how closer examination can render the most commonplace assumptions that we have about the most mundane, everyday aspects of our world can be essentially, well, wrong. Would it be more polite to say “inaccurate”?
Good morning. It's always more polite to say "inaccurate," "incorrect," or "erroneous" as opposed to "wrong." But not as much fun.
The stupid neighbor award is going to the one who texted me yesterday asking if I thought the DNR could re-home the owls because he’s annoyed by all the noise the crows are making. The crows are incessantly cawing at them. Dude I live right across the street and you live four houses down. Suck it up.