2445: X-SAMPA Aug 21, 2021

X-SAMPA was a system for transcribing, theoretically, any vocal sound in a standardized way. In 1995, this was not the first nor last attempt at something like this, notably coming about a century after the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) which was and is more dominant. What X-SAMPA brought to the table was that it allowed people to transcribe these sounds on a normal QWERTY keyboard as a way to get around IPA's special characters, even if they should have Unicode support. This is still used today, but X-SAMPA does not have a one-to-one correspondence with the IPA and in the current updated version there are IPA symbols that can't be transcribed in X-SAMPA.

2443: Georgian's Backward Familial Terms: დედა and მამა Aug 19, 2021

In Georgian, mother is დედა (dada) and 'father' is მამა (mama). These sounds are fairly standard for what parents are called, but swapped as it is usual to see a nasal consonant for mothers. This pretty exceptional case is not that all the rest have some particular etymology, but it is understood the nasal vowels are easier to produce while nursing hence the association with mothers, and for fathers, words with either [p] or [d] at the beginning are normal, as these will likely be the first non-nasal consonants an infant will utter in general. This is found around the world, but one of a handful of deviations to those rules happens in Georgian to deviate from both rules.

2432: θεός & Deus: Unrelated Aug 18, 2021

The Greek θεός (theos) meaning 'god' or 'divine' and the Latin 'deus' meaning 'god' are not related, despite the clear similarity in sound and meaning. θεός comes from a root meaning 'to place' in Proto-Indo-European while 'deus' is from a root meaning 'sky' and is related to the Greek 'Zeus' and 'Iupiter' as well as the 'Tiw' of 'Tuesday'. The Greek word is also related to the Latin 'fēriae' (festival), 'fānum' (temple), and 'fēstus' (festive).

2414: Sun- and Moon-Letters Jul 31, 2021

In Arabic and Maltese grammar, there are letters known as 'sun letters' while the rest are 'moon letters'. This is a direct translation of the Arabic حروف شمسية‎ (churūf shamsiyyah) and حروف قمرية (churūf qamariyyah) respectively. The distinction is that sun letters see the [l] of the definite article الْـ (al-) assimilate with the following letter, such as in 'the sun' which is الشمس (al-shams) but assimilates to (ash-shams) with a geminated consonant, while 'the moon' القمر (al-qamar) remains as such, hence the names. There are equal numbers of overall sun and moon letters in Arabic including ﻝ [l] which means [l] gets assimilated by [l], but Maltese there are more moon letters including L [l].

2367: Anomalous: The Rare Dagesh in Guttural Letters Jun 11, 2021

Hebrew uses a system of diacritics to represent vowels, but also to represent other phonetic changes. Still, there are some anomalous cases in the Torah. The dagesh—appearing as a dot in the middle of a letter—distinguishes basically 2 features; either it will distinguish between plosive or fricative forms in six letters: בג"ד כת"פ (note that not all of these are still productive) but more often the dagesh is used as a דגש חזק ('strong dot') indicating gemination. This latter use is found in all other letters to effectively double that particular sound but those mentioned above and the 'guttural letters': א‎, ה‎, ח‎, ע‎, and in many ways ways ר. This last case, ‎ר (reish), representing [ʁ] or [ʀ] is found in at least 17 cases, which is still very few, that are throughout the Prophets and Writings. Even fewer exceptional cases—about four—are found with א (aleph) even though this is often taken as a 'silent letter', such as in Genesis 43:26, Leviticus 23:17, and neither of these have other vowels added.

2365: Abnormal Syllabic Consonants Jun 9, 2021

There are syllabic consonants, which are syllables without vowels, but there are certain constraints on how most languages use them, such as how most are sonorants and especially nasal ([m] and [n]) and liquids ([l] and [ɹ]). English does have others, which is pretty rare across most languages, but in syllabic fricatives such as in 'shh'. These paralinguistic elements are not really words nor are these found as parts of other words as with syllabic consonants normally. For instance, the longest Czech sentence without vowels and only syllabic consonants is 25 words:

Škrt plch z mlh Brd pln skvrn z mrv prv hrd scvrnkl z brzd skrz trs chrp v krs vrb mls mrch srn čtvrthrst zrn.

(Stingy dormouse from Brdy mountains fogs full of manure spots firstly proudly shrank a quarter of handful seeds, a delicacy for mean does, from brakes through bunch of Centaurea flowers into scrub of willows)

2364: Czech's Vowelless Tongue-Twister Jun 8, 2021

The Czech language has a nasty tongue-twister without any vowels:

Strč prst skrz krk

This is notably as well because it is totally grammatically sound, meaning 'stick your finger through your throat': quite fitting too. Indeed, those words are all fairly normal, and are among many without vowels. The way this is possible from a syllabic point is that each word has [r] which is acting as a so-called syllabic-R. English also has syllabic consonants such as the [m] in 'column' wherein a consonant is a whole syllable. This is very common in Slavic languages too, especially around [r], [l] and sometimes [m] hence the word čtvrtsmršť (a type of measurement).

2294: Disfix Mar 28, 2021

There are many types of affixes, including ones which are not only additive, whether in the middle or on the ends [1]. One more for instance is the so-called 'disfix' which is a type of affix (such as in French a suffix) which is subtractive, meaning is causes a loss to the stem. Usually, this happens to the final segment of the stem, just before the disfix. For instance, with this pluralization from French:

bœuf (cow) as [bœf] --> bœufs (cows/cattle) as [bø]

such that the [f] is deleted in the plural. This also happens with adjectives such as

fausse (wrong (fem.)) as [fos] --> faux (wrong (masc.)) as [fo].

This process is common in certain North American native languages like Alabama, Choctaw, or other Muskogee languages.

2291: Stress in Tonal Languages Mar 25, 2021

It would be reasonable to assume that tonal languages, which already rely on changes in pitch to distinguish between words don't have stress or meter since those functions also involve volume, length, and even pitch. This assumption would be incorrect however. While it is true that these features are less relevant than in certain non-tonal languages, stressed syllables have been found in Mandarin for example by utilizing change in the fundamental frequency of the pitch (i.e. the swing in pitch of one individual tone) greater than that of the unstressed syllable, which would therefore have a more narrow change in pitch by itself.

2253: Intro to Pinyin Feb 14, 2021

Pinyin is the official system for transliterating Mandarin Chinese using Latin letters, designed in the 1950's. The goal was to make the language easier to teach to those unfamiliar with the language at the beginning stages. That said, as with any writing system the sounds represented will not be exactly the same. In European languages this is of course still true such as the English Z [z] compared to the German Z [ts], but Pinyin established relations between letters that are otherwise related traditionally, like

J [tɕ], Q [tɕʰ], and X [ɕ] or alternatively

Z [ts], C [tsʰ] (granted Z and C these are commonly related in Slavic languages). Overall, the way the spelling is approximated does not take from any single European language, but picks certain ones out individually.

aside from those sounds usually more distant to the Western ear, the system does allow for a general approximation of Chinese pronunciation, especially with vowels.

2221: What 'Waffle' Can Teach about Phonology Jan 13, 2020

The word 'waffles' can actually teach a fair amount about general phonological principles. First off, while it is from a Germanic root meaning 'honeycomb' (cf. German 'Wabe') and ultimately related to 'weave, it is also related to the word 'wafer' and 'goffer': two other dessert foods, directly related. This shows the relation as is often found between [l] and [r], but also [g] and [w], which often shift in Germanic languages, but elsewhere too as seen in the French 'gaufre' (wafer). [g], as a voiced velar consonant, often does assimilate to an approximant (a consonant with certain vocalic qualities like [w]) or to a palatal one like [j] such as in the Old English 'geolu' turning into 'yellow'.

As a side-note, 'waffle' is actually not related to the verb 'waffle', as in "to talk foolish", usually in a frenetic way which is related to the word 'wave' and 'waft', relating to one's hand-gestures.

2178: What is Whispering? Dec 1, 2020

Whispering is something that everyone knows intuitively but might not be able to explain exactly.

Whispering is a process by which the vocal folds, sometimes called vocal chords, are not vibrating, though air still passes through. Therefore while all the processes of sound production above the larynx remains the same as in normal speech, rather than oscillating between voiceless and voiced sounds, the latter of which is determined by whether the vocal folds vibrate, whispering uses oscillation between voiceless sounds and whisper. That means that distinctions between voiced sounds like [b, d, g] and voiceless sounds, the counterparts here being [p, t, k] are minimal, and AI technology still struggles to understand this. In general, although whispering takes less energy overall, the vocal folds actually get more strained.

2163: Germanic Plural Endings: How -R is Related to -S

In English, non-rhoticity—the loss of /r/ before a consonant or at the end of a word—initially was process that affected by [s] only, thus leading to ‘bass’ from the Old English ‘bærs’, among others, as explained in the video about English vs. American R’s. A process not so conceptually different to this also establishes the connection between the Dutch plural ending -s and the Scandinavian -r plurals, but the process went the other way around. This is to say that the most common pluralizing ending across Germanic languages today is -s but that it has become an -r in Swedish, though to be clear there have always been Germanic inflectional endings of different varieties, including commonly -en (e.g. ox-oxen; Haus-Hausen), internal vowel changes (e.g. tooth-teeth), and -er (Buch-Bücher). Indeed, the -s ending that is now the overwhelmingly dominant form in English was only used for a many masculine nouns, and not for feminine or neuter, making up less than half therefore but still a plurality. So effectively as English used -s more to to others being pushed out, Swedish used plural -s less due to the rhoticity.

2158: Pronunciation of 'Woman' Nov 11, 2020

The spelling of ‘woman’ is sometimes controversial due to its assumed relation to the word ‘man’, but even just for how it represents pronunciation it should ring a few bells. For the singular, this is fairly straightforward insofar as the ‘-man’ pronunciation is consistent with other unstressed forms of this like in ‘foreman’, as /mən/. In the first vowel of the singular (woman), this actually began as /i/ (as in ‘wee’) due to the origin with the word ‘wif’ (woman; wife). This got gradually rounded, referring to the posture of the lips and pronounced further back, referring to the posture of the tongue: wʊmən. Regarding the plural form furthermore (women), while it is spelt like the plural of ‘men’, it is not the latter vowel that changes, but that the first vowel becomes [ɪ] (as in ‘in’): thus wɪmən. A nonstandard variant of this, particularly in parts of America does actually change the latter vowel: wʊmiːn; this distinction may however actually be less clear due to the stress of the word.

2156: Canaanite Shift Nov 9, 2020

When languages split from each other, often the change comes from sound shifts. These, like the Great Vowel Shift in English, or Grimm's Law encompassing Germanic languages are quite broad in scope, but this isn't always, or even usually the case. The Canaanite Shift describes a process wherein [a] became [o] in long syllables. This affected Northwest Semitic languages like Hebrew and Aramaic, but not South Semitic like Arabic. For instance Tiberian Hebrew שלום (šalom) and the Arabic سلام (salām) share a root meaning 'complete; peace' but differ in the stressed vowel. This shift was so productive that this affected inflections, i.e. it affected the morphology and not only the roots of words, such as the plural ending [at] in Arabic or [ot] in Hebrew:

"Girls; daughters": بَنَات (banāt) versus בָּנוֹת (bānōṯ)

Or with present participles, such as

“Writer; the one writing”: كاتب (kātib) versus כותב (kōṯēḇ)

2149: Celtic Mutation, & Vowel Harmony Nov 2, 2020

Learning a language and its irregularities can be a real frustration, but some languages make this harder than others. Hungarian, Finnish, and Turkish feature so-called vowel-harmony, where the vowels near each other change regularly depending on the how affixes are attached (and there are a lot). For instance in Hungarian, -nek/-nak are the same dative suffix, but change depending on the vowel in the root word.

város város-nak 'city'

öröm öröm-nek 'joy'

On the opposite conceptual end, Celtic languages have mutations, meaning—as in the chart below—that based off of the surrounding words there is consonant mutation. For example

coeden goeden nghoeden choeden

meaning 'tree' in Welsh are all different forms of the same word, depending on what comes before it, and this process is how words are formed normally.

Celtic Vowel Mutations (imagine: public domain)

2141: "Loansounds" in Hebrew: [tʃ] Oct 25, 2020

Hebrew has no letter to represent [tʃ] (like in CHew) but there are two different traditions to draw from to do this. The way that was used for Yiddish, which did have this sound regularly, was to write טש (T-SH) as is used in קטשופ (ketchup). This word is also notable because it doesn't use the for of פ when it appears at the end of the word, ף, where one would be expected. Because the sound only exists in new loanwords, what Hebrew usually does for other foreign sounds instead is to add a sort of apostrophe (׳) known as a 'geresh' to indicate a variant. In this case, 'crunch' is written as קרונצ׳, as a variant of צ normally for /ts/. This is also used for instance for the [dʒ] sound (as in 'Jump'), written as a variant of ג which usually represents [g].

1753: Infants Can Discern any Phoneme Oct 2, 2019

Adults can often seem to struggle more with developing new language skills than very young children, especially when it comes to pronunciation. There are lots of little reasons for adults having difficulty with grammars etc., and certainly one or two myths around it, but one thing that's easily noticeable is that adults tend to struggle with accents, while children don't, not only because they have more adaptable larynxes from not speaking in (usually) one way most of the time, but also they can actually discriminate between sounds better. Infants can hear the difference in every phoneme more or less, and lose that ability after a short time. They continue to use the ones they hear and get positive feedback for pronouncing, and drop the rest. However, babies do not necessarily discriminate between illegal syllables in the given language, but knowledge of sound constraints must logically follow from gaining knowledge of the sounds first.

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1602: larynx, pharynx, and syrinx May 4, 2019

Humans are able to make different vibrations, such as in the difference between [s] and [z] using the larynx. The etymology of this word is not totally certain, though it has meant 'upper windpipe' since the days of Latin; what is more certain is that is was influenced by the word 'pharynx', which is also a word for the windpipe, particularly in invertebrates, again from Latin. Still related though is the word 'spirynx', which is a larynx in the lower windpipe that birds have, except rather than just having Latin roots, this word comes from the name of the nymph in the story of Pan. In the story, the pursued nymph asked to be turned into reeds to escape, but Pan turned them into 'pan pipes' to play. The physiology of the syrinx will be discussed this week.
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1246: How are Sounds Related?: [t] and [k] May 8, 2018

It is hard to judge the two most similar pairs of sounds in English. Looking at the place of articulation for sounds, it could appear that [p]/[b] is a lot closer to [t]/[d] than [k]/[g], with the former two being pronounced at the front of the mouth (lips and teeth respectively) and the latter produced towards the back, but there is a higher frequency of eggcorns produced from confusions over the sounds [t] and [k] than with [p]. This can be evidenced with 'buck naked' being misheard as 'butt naked'.
Make sure to watch the video out tomorrow: What's a word? on the Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNofHfYEoM2l7fu2340gsDQ