[Music] L: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast
that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm
Lauren
Gawne. G: And I'm Gretchen McCulloch. And
today we are all over the place with vowel
gymnastics! But first! Our monthly Patreon
episode this month is about conlangs, so you
can listen to us talk
about people who create languages and the
process of creating languages, and support
the show by going to
patreon.com/lingthusiasm, and listen to that
and all the previous bonus episodes there.
L: We have, like, ten bonus recorded
episodes now, and all of our bonus episodes
from this point on are full-length episodes,
so you get two full
Lingthusiasm episodes for the price of one
Patreon subscription, and if you can't support
the Patreon, as always you get the monthly
free episode here on SoundCloud
or wherever else you get your podcasts. G:
And thanks so much to everybody who's doing
that already.
[Music] G: So. Vowels. L: Human voices are
amazing. Like, the fact that we communicate
by speech is this
amazing process that's basically that humans
are giant meat tubes, and we make air go through
those tubes to make sounds. But that's disgusting,
and that's why we call it phonetics instead
of meat tubes. G: Meat tube science? L: The
science of meat tubes and air! So, we kind
of push air through, and then we have different
parts of our vocal tract, so our – what
we think of as voice box and our mouth, and
all the things in our mouth, to kind of change
– G: And especially our tongue! L: – especially
our tongue! – changes the way the air flows,
and that changes the quality of the sound.
And so all of this that we're saying now is
based on
that outflow of air, but it's how we stop
and change and shape the air that makes different
sounds! G: So, you have a mouth. You're listening
to this,
you've got a mouth. You've got a tongue in
it. That's kind of weird. Your tongue has
a certain amount of space that it can move
within your mouth. So, you start from
behind your teeth – your tongue can be kind
of up there. L: Nnn... if you are not pulling
funny faces to yourself on the
train, you're not doing this right. G: I'm
pulling funny faces right now, I can't even
talk 'cause I'm trying to act it out! You
can go
down a bit, so you can go down below your
lower teeth. L: [mumbled] Has a really great
effect. G: You can go back – go back in
the kind of, like, dentist move, like, "Open
your mouth as wide as
you can and say aaaah!" L: Aaaah! G: Aaaah!
And then you can go kind of back up as far
– like, to the top of the roof of your mouth
at the back
– and [garbled] and you have it up here.
You know, maybe you can hear me sounding kind
of weird,
that's 'cause I'm trying to act it out. You
should act it out! You're sitting here anyway,
you've got the time, what else are you doing
with it? Don't answer that. L: Just let a
big – especially if you're in public, just
let a big bunch of air go and go,
"Eeeaaaaayyooooauuugh." Kind of. Move that
tongue around. G: Eeeaaaauuuooo. And you can
go backwards, too, you can go, "Aaaeeeeiiii."
L: Hours of fun. G: Hours of fun! What's cool
about this is that the vowels – we think
about them as distinct, like there's this
vowel and there's that vowel, there's /i/
and there's /a/, but they're on a continuum.
And when you drop your jaw in a vowel position,
you can sliiiide down from one vowel to the
next. Or you can slide back up when you raise
your jaw again. L: Eeeaaaaaiiiieeee. G: Or
ooooouuuaaaaaa. L: That was a good one. G:
Yeah! Yeah, that was a different one. So you
can do "aaaoooouuuu." And
you can also slide front and back, so you
can go "iiiieeeeeaaaa." L: Iiiiieeeeeaaaa?
It sounds like I'm asking a question. G: Or
"ooooeeeeeuuuu." L: Okay. So we can move all
around in that space. G: And when linguists
talk about this space, we talk about vowels
as existing in a trapezoid, which, in
case you've forgotten your grade-school geometry,
a trapezoid is kind of like a square, right,
but the top bits are more pushed out so it
looks like either a triangle that's been chopped
off, or a square that's been stretched on
one side. L: Yep. G: And the top bit of the
trapezoid, the part that represents the roof
your mouth, is wider and has more stuff potentially
going on in it because you have more space
in the roof of your mouth
than you do on the bottom part of your jaw.
L: We will make sure that there's a picture
that has one of these
abstracted trapezoids overlaid on an actual
face so you can kind of get an idea what we're
getting at here. G: Yeah, so definitely
check out the show notes to make sure you
get the picture. But there is an abstract
picture, and you can visualise it in your
mouth in three-dimensional space. It doesn't
really matter it's really mostly two-dimensional,
because
there's not much of a difference in terms
of what you do on the left side of your mouth
or the right side of your mouth,
you're going to produce the same vowels. That's
not something that languages do, that people
do. L: We're nice and symmetrical when it
comes to that part. G: Yeah. There's also
this very, very cool website which is called
Pink
Trombone. L: I guess because like that slide
– I mean, we were doing basically trombone
impersonations, you kind of sliiide
between things. G: And it'll give you a model
vocal tract and you can slide the tongue around
and you can listen to it make the vowels as
you slide the tongue into different positions.
L: You can play the old meat tube. G: But
you also possess your own and
you can play around with it, and pay attention
to what your tongue is doing, because normally,
like, we figure all this stuff
out when we're babies. Like, you don't think
about it, you've forgotten it. And so you
can think about, like, what's your tongue
doing? If you leave this episode and you – L:
If you leave this episode without thinking
about how disgusting tongues are, you've done
very,
very well. G: Yep. L: Congratulations. G:
Uh, no, you've done poorly, you should be
thinking about how
weird tongues are! So what's cool about this
trapezoid and the fact that vowels are points
on a continuum rather then discrete objects
– you know, there's
a big difference between /p/ and /t/ because
you have to put your lips and your tongue
in very different positions for those. But
the difference between /i/ and /e/ is really
more a question of degree rather than kind.
It's all part of this kind of
nebulous vowel space. L: Yeah, consonants
are often – not always, but often – a
lot more locked-in, you're either one or the
other. G: Whereas vowels go all over the place!
And they are so weird! And cool. And if you
want to practice getting a sense of just how
weird your tongue is, one of my favourite
things to do with students, which I stole
from, I think, the linguist Jessi Grieser
on Facebook – hi Jessi, if you're listening!
– is to get students to put a lollipop on
your tongue, kind of on the back part of your
tongue, and make a bunch of vowels. And you
can feel the lollipop
moving and the stick coming out, and you're
like, "Oh, the stick is moving forward and
backwards!" And so
you can see where it's going and see how it
moves. L: That is tastier than every other
way of gaining phonetic data that I know
about. G: So, if you're very, very lucky and
you're enrolled in an Intro Linguistics class,
maybe one day you'll get
a lollipop and get to play around with vowels
with it. L: Take your own! Like, "I'm here
in Intro to Phonetics!" G: DIY the lollipop.
When I first heard about this I was like,
"Well, I'm at home, I don't have any lollipops,
what am I going to do?" So I ended up getting
a gummy candy and sticking a toothpick in
it? It
worked okay! L: That's good fieldwork improvisation.
G: Yeah, at first I tried it with a toothbrush,
but the toothbrush was too heavy and
it kept falling out of my mouth. L: Mmm. G:
And it didn't stick 'cause it wasn't, you
know, candy enough. L: It's fuzzy and not
made of
sugar. G: Then I got a toothpick and a gummy
bear and it worked okay. L: So you got a sense
of where in your mouth your tongue was as
you were doing the different vowels. G: Yeah,
because it's
so unconscious to us, we have to think about
the content of what we're saying, we don't
often get to drill down and think about the
vowels. L: Yeah. I mean, it's unconscious,
but we have this really strong sense of it,
because it's vowels that are usually driving
the
difference between accents. G: Mm! L: You
know, both of us have a "P", and we say "P"
more or less the same, and we have an "M"
and we say /m/ more or less the same. But
it's our vowels that are really, really different.
Well, not really, really different, but more
different. G: Yeah, and so when you're hearing
a difference in an accent in somebody, or
a different variety of English, you're often
hearing a thing that they're doing differently
for
their vowels. So sometimes you get – especially
thinking of the vowel situation as a space
is what explains why
some sounds become other sounds in particular
accents. So there are some varieties of English
that have that
have what's known as the pin/pen merger. L:
Yeah. G: So in these varieties you have people
say, like, "a sewing pin" and "a writing pin"
because those are the same sound to them.
L: Yep. G: And the reason that that's
possible is because /ɪ/ and /ɛ/, the sounds
in "pin" and "pen," they're neighbours in
the vowel space. L: Yeah. Well,
they're neighbours for us, but they live in
the same share house for people with that
merger. G: Yeah, exactly! And so because they're
neighbours they can also become roommates!
They can become – they can glom on to each
other and people can say, "Okay, this is actually
just one space for me."
L: Yeah. G: And it's all this sound that's
kind of halfway between the two. L: Or, for
example, other people might move them further
apart. G: Yeah. L: So, I have generally pretty
high vowels? So my /ai/, /i/ vowels are generally
higher than yours are. G: Huh. Okay, say an
example of that. So I
have "me," and you have...? L: So I say "me."
G: Me. Me. Yeah, I think that is higher in
my mouth than – me?
Me. Hm. Okay. /i/ You can have lots of fun
with your friends and trying to say lots of
vowels like this. And so the reason why the
pin/pen merger is possible – so you don't
get, for example, the pin/pan merger. L: Yeah.
G: That's not going to happen anywhere, because
"-an" is pronounced way at the
back of the mouth, it's a lot like your dentist
"aaaah". "Paaan." And "pin" is all the way
at the front of the mouth and higher against
the roof the mouth. So if you have a low back
vowel and high front vowel, a lot
has to happen in order for them to glom on
to each other. L: Yep. G: But if you have
two vowels and one is high front and the other
one is kind of mid front, then they're pretty
close to each other and so it's easy for them
to take on the same space. Like, "pin" and
"pen" do that. L: It's
actually impressive that we can all speak
with slightly different – our vowels existing
in slightly different points on the vowel
space and we can all accommodate that. It's
a really impressive cognitive feat, not only
that different
people can produce different accents with
different vowels, but then people who don't
speak that accent, with only generally a little
bit of exposure, can kind
of figure out what's happening and regularise
it in their brain. G: Yeah, 'cause it's kind
of interesting that we only
notice it when something goes wrong? So, if
you're saying a word in context where the
word is mostly
predictable from context and you're hearing
what everybody else's vowels are, and what
all the other vowels in all the other words
are doing, then a word – even with quite
a different vowel from how you
might say it – is still pretty comprehensible
because you're shifting your whole representation
of a vowel space in, you know, seconds to
accommodate someone else that you're
listening to. And then the only time it goes
wrong is when you have a word that you just
don't have any context
for. So this happened to me with New Zealand
English, because I was watching Flight of
the Conchords. L:
Which is a fabulous show and has some really
great New Zealand accents. G: Yes. And one
of the guys, one of the Conchords,
is named Brett, what I would call Brett. L:
Yep. G: But of course anything goes with names!
Like, anything can be a name, you don't necessarily
know
how someone's name is going to be spelled
just from how they say it and so on. L: Uh-huh.
G: And so when he was introducing himself
on a show, he'd be like, "My name is Brit."
And I was like, your
name's what? I don't... I don't have that
vowel? Like, surely it maps onto one of my
vowels, but I don't know which one! L: What
did you decide it was? G: I had to look it
up! Like, I didn't –
I was like, "Brit like Britney?!" But this
guy seems very dudely and I think of that
as a woman's name, but maybe it's not? You
know,
maybe his name is Brit? L: Yeah. G: But nobody
else seems surprised about this, so I was
like maybe it's not Brit? Like... L: But after
watching the show for long enough, do you
think if you then came across them
introducing a new character whose name was
"Dib" would you think... G: Oh, then I'd be
like, "Oh, maybe that's Deb." L: Yeah, so
you
would kind of normalise it. You know who's
really bad at figuring out vowels across different
accents? G: Who's that? L: Computers! G: Oh,
what's that! L: We do it so intuitively and
without thinking – and it's hard when you
come across a new accent that you can learn
to accommodate it – that we often forget
that
speech recognition really, really struggles
with this. G: It really, really does. Yeah.
And so, I don't know, I haven't tried to play
a Flight of the Conchords excerpt for Google
Assistant or Alexa or Siri or one of these
to see how they manage it, but it's probably
bad. L: It's quite possible they would try
and call your friend Britney if you asked
it to call "Brit." G: Ah, yeah, that would
be a problem.
So, when we create the transcripts for the
show, we run the transcripts through YouTube's
auto-captioning feature first of all, and
then we get a human to fix them because they
always need a lot of fixing, but at least
it makes
it faster. And the YouTube auto-transcriber
does have a lot of difficulty with your surname,
Lauren! Do you want to say your surname again
for us? L: Hi, I'm Lauren Gawne. Which is
different from the
past tense verb "gone." So, "I've gone to
see Lauren Gawne," they're two different vowels
for me. G: So is that the same
difference that you have between "cot" and
"caught," like a bed and the past tense of
"catch"? L: Yes. So: "I caught a cold" and
"I
bought a cot." G: Right! So, when I met Lauren,
I was like, "So you have this distinction
between the past tense of go and your
surname, but I don't think I make this distinction
in any other words, because..." L: So "caught"
and "cot" are housemates in your vowel space.
G: Yeah, they're just joined at the hip, they're
the
same thing. So, because they're already the
same vowel for me, I was like, I don't think
I can reconfigure my vowel space,
what I need is how can I map your name onto
my vowel space, because I'm not going to acquire
an Australian
accent just so I can say your name. L: So,
like, the lengths you don't go to. So, how
would you introduce me to someone? G: So I
would say, "This is Lauren
[Gone]." L: Yeah. G: You know, because that's
the accommodation. I said, "Is it okay if
I pronounce your name as the past tense of
go,
because I don't think I have the vowel that
you actually use." L: And of course because
we're linguists, that was actually how the
conversation went. G: Oh, yeah,
that's literally what I said! L: But people
just make these accommodations all the time.
G: Yeah. And one of the things that I think
is cool is, you know, vowels can glom on to
each other or they can get further apart,
become estranged, but this often happens at
a level that's not just one individual set
of neighbours. Like, if we
have a bunch of neighbours and I move into
your room and then you're like, "Excuse me,
I was occupying this room, you move into the
room down the hall,
the next one." And then that person's like,
"Hi, sorry, I was here!" L: "I'm sorry, this
is my room." G:
And so I'm gonna occupy this next one. And
then eventually we get all the way to the
end of the hallway and that person's like,
"Excuse
me," and so they go back around to the front
of the hall and they're like, "Oh, this room
seems empty, I guess I'll take it." L: It's
like a giant square
dance. G: Yeah, yeah! Square dancing, that's
a good example. I was trying to think of an
analogy before this and I was like, "Dominoes?"
L: Sometimes you'll expect someone to go into
the room on the left and they're like, "I'm
going to go see if anyone's in this room on
the right. Oh, hi, like, you
have to get out now." So these mergers and
stuff don't occur in isolation. Once one part
of the vowel space starts to move, everyone
has
to start moving to kind of fit in with that.
And we've seen it happen many, many – the
reason that we have the diversity in accents
that we have
in English is because this shift has happened
several times throughout history and several
times in different
places, and it's happening right now in some
places, which is super exciting! G: Yeah,
it is! So, the first
time that I went to LA and the friend that
I was visiting said, "Something you have to
understand about Los Angeles is
everyone talks about the traffic instead of
the weather, 'cause the weather is always
nice, and so our small talk conversation is
about how the bad the traffic is instead."
And I was like,
"Sounds weird, but okay." And she said, "No,
no, you really have to understand how important
it is, there is this whole
sketch on Saturday Night Live about people
talking about the traffic in California."
And I was like, "I have not seen this!" And
so she dragged me over to the computer and
she pulled up YouTube and she's like, "You
need to watch this sketch." L: This is your
social
induction into LA. G: This is my social induction
into LA culture. And so I watched this sketch
and I was like, "Oh yes, they are talking
about the traffic, but what really interests
me about this sketch is the vowels." L: Of
course it did. G: I drew her a vowel diagram,
I was like, "This is what they're doing!"
L: You're a good friend,
Gretchen. G: And she was like, "Oh, I think
I kind of finally understand what it is you
do with linguistics!" L: So what is happening
with Californian vowels? Can you give us a
few examples? G: Yeah. So you get these people
with, you
know, their spray tans and so on, and they
come in and – there's one line in a clip
that I looked up before this, I'll link to
a clip if you want to
watch a whole longer thing – but the character
says something like, "This femily reunion's
gonna be hyuge." "Have you cut the
cucumbers for the dep yet?" And there's a
couple key words in that. There's "femily"
for "family." "Femily reunion's gonna be
hyuge." And this "hyuge" which is for "huge."
L: Yeah. G: And there is "dep" for "dip."
"Dep" for "dip." L:
"Get the dep." G: And what's really interesting
is there is a vowel shift that's going on
in California right now
– it's also happening in Canada, actually,
it's like the Canada/California shift? L:
Cool. G: Yeah! And it's pushing a bunch of
vowels in a particular direction. So it is
making the /ɪ/ vowel in "dip" a little bit
further down, like /ɪ/ to /ɛ/. And what
this skit does, is it says, "We're not just
going to take /ɪ/ to /ɛ/ like normal
Californians do, we're actually going to take
it one step further, we're gonna take it all
the way to /a/." L: So that's why it
sounded particularly over-caricatured. G:
Yeah, so it's an exaggerated version of this
vowel shift that California's
already doing. And the same thing, that they're
going to "hyuge," the /u/ vowel in California
is moving towards
the front of the mouth, where /ɪ/ was, but
instead of just moving it like a little bit
forward, /u/ to /ʉ/ – L: Yeah. G: They're
going way further forward. "Hyuge." I'm doing
vocal fry at the same time,
but, you know, you gotta keep your whole feature
set together. So what's really interesting
about this is, like, I am really sure that
no
one at SNL got out their vowel chart and was
like, "All right. What we really need to do..."
L: Where's the
California vowel shift at now? Let's move
it one step further. G: Let's move it one
step further. Let's gather all the actors
around, let's explain to them how
the vowel system works, and let's tell them,
"Okay, every time you were going to say 'dip'
you need to say 'dep' and this is why..."
I am really sure they did not have a linguist
on staff. And yet what they did is actually
very linguistically consistent, it's a linguistic
exaggeration
that is very theoretically sound! And it's
because, I'm sure what they actually did is
something like someone was like, "Hey, I can
make this cool, exaggerated-sounding California
accent! Everybody listen to me!" And people
were like, "Oh, that
sounds fun! Let me imitate it too!" And so
you get a bunch of people sitting around being
like, "Oh yeah, I can imitate this accent!"
And someone was like, "Let's make a sketch
making fun of Californians!" L: And as things
move, they don't all – not all vowel shifts
shift in the same way. And so, your example
with Flight of the Conchords is a really great
example. So, "Brett" moves up to "Brit," so
it's much higher. And then of course your
"dip" kind of sounds are like, "hey, buddy
we are here" and in California
it goes down and it's still very front, it's
/dɛp/. G: Yeah, so it's kind of the inverse
shift. So, "Brett" to
"Brit" and "dip" to "dep" are the opposite
of the same thing, and it's sensitive to the
same pair of "these two sounds are similar
to each other." L: Yeah. And so while the
Californian one went down to "dep," the New
Zealand vowel shift goes down to
"dup," which is more of an /ə/, or our friend
the schwa. G: Ahh, because "Brit" is taking
up that... L: So "Brit" has taken up that.
And so Californian English decided to go down
to "dep," and New Zealand English has gone
down to
"dup." G: Do you have an example of this in
a word? L: Um, so, "dup." Or the famous shibboleth
one for New Zealand English is
talking about – instead of ordering "fish
and chips" you order "fush and chups." G:
Ahhh! Fush and chups! L: Is the uber-stereotyped.
But it's that vowel is the main – that little
shift that's happening is the main way to
distinguish
New Zealand and Australian accent. G: Yes.
So you don't have any "Brits" or "chups."
L: No, we have "Brett" and
we have "fish and chips." G: But a lot of
the rest of the accent is very similar. L:
Yes. G: Yeah, so there's your free "How
to Tell the Difference Between Australian
and New Zealand Accents" feature. L: And so
these have both shifted. The same vowel in
California has moved out of the same house
as
New Zealand, but they've moved into different
neighbourhoods after that. G: Yeah, they took
different paths
along the hallway. I'm picturing like a dorm
or something, where you have a bunch of rooms
along a hall. L: I'm thinking of the Cluedo
board,
personally. G: Okay! Did you ever play that
game called Sorry?
I don't know, maybe people call it Trouble?
Is this a Canadian thing? L: Ah, yes, I've
played
Trouble. Is it called Sorry in Canada? That
is the most Canadian board game I've ever
heard of. G: 'Cause when you knock someone
out of their
position in the game you have to say "sorry!"
But, like, you're not sincere about it. L:
No, only you have to say sorry, you Canadians.
We can say, "Ha, you're in trouble!" G: No,
we're like, "Sorry!" But in a gleeful sense,
not in an actually apologetic sense. L: So
it's essentially like a re-skin of Ludo where
you move
different coloured counters around the board
and you enjoy knocking people off the board.
G: This is why I like talking about vowel
gymnastics, because the vowels kind of topple
over. They move in a cycle, they
move around the whole space. They don't just
do these individual, atomised things by themselves.
There's also a really cool example of this
in the history of English. L: A really good
example,
called the Great Vowel Shift. It's pretty
great. G: It's pretty great. It's the only
one that has "great" in the name. All
the other ones are named after their locations,
the Great Vowel Shift is just, you know, Vowel
Shift the Great. L: And
it was great because it really changed the
way English around the – between, like,
the 1300s and the 1600s? So, this is the reason
why Chaucer and Shakespeare sound so different
when you read them is because in between,
all of the vowels in English really just started
moving –
systematically, not chaotically – around
in the vowel space to the new homes that haven't
moved that much since the
1600s. G: Yeah, I mean this is also the reason,
if you've learned any other language that
uses the Roman alphabet, that English spelling
is so
weird. L: Yep. G: So if you take a word like
"coffee" in English, and "coffee" has this
"e-e" at the end. And the "e-e" is a very
standard English way of spelling the sound
/i/. But in Old English, the letter that we
now talk about as "e" was pronounced /e/.
So a word like
"coffee" was pronounced more like "coffay."
L: Yeah. G: And if that sounds like the word
"café", which was borrowed in from
French, and French did not have this shift
happen, after the shift already happened...
so "coffee" and "café", they used to be pronounced
basically the same way. L: Yeah. G: Words
like "knee," like
the part of your body, were pronounced /kne/.
So this /i/ - /e/ relationship – so, the
first thing that happens – well, scholars
aren't quite
sure what order it happened, but let's say
for the sake of argument that the /e/ sound
pops up to the /i/ sound. So /kne/
becomes "knee". L: /met/ becomes "meat". G:
Yeah. And then – so, two things happen,
right. So the one thing, the sound that was
formerly the /i/
sound is like, "Excuse me! I was here!" L:
Yeah. And so it drops down, it becomes a diphthong,
which is /ai/. So this is the letter "I".
L: So a
word like /bit/ becomes our word "bite," as
in "don't bite that lollipop." And so that
/ai/, if you think about what's happening
with that /ait/ in "bite," you're going from
one part of the vowel space to the other,
in the vowel. Compared to something like "bit",
which is just a single – you're kind of
going to
one spot in the vowel space and hanging out
there, "bite" is like someone who owns two
houses in different neighbourhoods and kind
of moves between them. G: It's like if I bought
the apartment next door and I put half my
stuff in one and half the stuff in the other
and I was like, "I'm just going to hang out
in both of these!" L: So we have "bite" now,
and that's
become a diphthong. G: Yeah. It's two vowel
sounds. And then – now we're down at the
bottom and we've got the regular /a/ sound,
and it was like, "Yeah, I'm just going to
squish forward a little bit to get out of
the way of
/ai/!" And so you have /æ/, so in a word
like – L: So "mate" was /mat/ and becomes
"mate." It gets up and moves out a bit. G:
Well, yeah, so it moves up into where /e/
was, because /kne/ left that
space for it. L: Yep. We'll have a diagram
of this in the show notes. G: It's helpful
to have the audio for it, but it's hard to
visualise! And so, they all moved around.
And what's interesting is that – so this
is your "coffay," it was
around there – and the same thing happened
for the back vowels. So a word like "goose"
with – so, the double-o letter combination,
which we think of as an /u/ in English, like
"goose," was at
one point pronounced /go:sə/. L: Hehehe!
G: Which is amazing. L: Yup. G: And the same
thing as like the double-e in "knee" – /kne/,
"knee" –
L: /go:sə/. G: /go:sə/. L: Goose. G: Goose.
L: Goin' up. G: So they both moved up. L:
Yep. G: And
the actual letter /u/ – well, that one kind
of became... it did a bunch of things. L:
Yeah, so not all of them stayed
exactly the same, and there were all these
other factors involved, but the important
thing is vowels started
shifting. And they did this on a massive scale,
and it changed what we think of as the way
English is spoken. And it certainly didn't
help with how it was written! G: And it had
this weird repercussion. So, a lot of people
learned in school that English has the
long vowels and the short vowels. And the
mnemonic that I learned was the long vowels
are the ones that say their own name – so
"e,
a, u, o", those are the ones that say their
own name – and the short vowels like /ɪ/
and /ɛ/ and /a/ don't say their own name.
L:
Yes. G: But that's a weird mnemonic! Why are
we calling them long and short for that reason?
And it's because – L: Especially when we've
just learnt the word diphthong! G: I know!
It's because in the history of English, and
in many modern languages still currently,
there are
long and short vowels, and the long vowels
are literally pronounced for a longer period
of time. That's the difference. L:
Yep. That is the difference. G: So if you
have something like /bet/ and /be:t/, one
of those is just longer. Or hypothetically
you have /kne/ and /kne:/. L: Which is really
hard as an English-speaker to get the hang
of because you're used to
hearing these clear differences in the place,
or that they're diphthongs or something like
that. G: Or /go:s/ and
/go::s/. L: You've made a ridiculous word
even more ridiculous. G: I'm doing great at
this. And so what happened was this change
affected only the English long
00:28:56,42 --> 00:29:02,11
vowels. They shifted. They were all in competition
with each other. And the English short vowels
stayed pretty much where they were and did
pretty much a similar thing. So we used to
have these nice pairs of /i/ and /i:/, /e/
and
/e:/, /a/ and /a:/. And it was very symmetric.
And, you know, it has a little bit of a different
sound quality to it, but it was pretty much
just the length that made the distinction.
And this is what Latin had
had, for example. Latin had /a/ and /a:/,
/i/ and
/i:/. And so Latin was like, "Look, I've got
five vowels, they come in long and short versions,
but that's pretty easy, so I'm just going
to have five vowel letters." And Old English
had pretty
much five vowels and long and short versions!
And so five vowel letters was very reasonable.
And then this vowel
shift happened and now your long /e:/ is being
pronounced /i/, and your long /i:/ being pronounced
/ai/, and the short – L: But you still only
got five letters to
write it with! G: I know! And they have so
little relationship with each other except
historically! L: Yup. G: And it just – like,
that's why English spelling is so completely
weird. Partly because of this
thing that happened in the Middle Ages when
a whole bunch of vowels shifted and we kept
writing them the same way, because the writing
system was already established. And then,
because this thing on top of it where now
we have a whole bunch of different varieties
of
English and a lot of them are undergoing their
own separate vowel shifts, and they're still
all being written the same way. L: Which brings
us to a really interesting
question, which is how does the IPA deal with
vowels? Because we have this infinite possibility
of spaces where vowels could be, but we have
to write them in some way, and obviously the
English system is not going to work. G: The
English system is not going to
work. And you do see this sometimes, so sometimes
if you see languages that have been written
with other writing systems – they get
romanised, they have different romanisation
versions of them – depending on when that
romanisation happened, sometimes the romanisation
will use English conventions. So, for
example, if you think of the Chinese last
name "Lee," sometimes it's written L-E-E,
which is using the English convention, that
double-e stands for the /i/ sound. And sometimes
that same last name is written L-I, which
is using a different convention that the
letter "I", which in every other language
that uses the Roman alphabet, you know, French
and Spanish and so on, that's what that letter
stands for. So you can look at transcription
systems and say, "Okay, was this person using
an English perspective or an international,
Latin-based
perspective when they were romanising this
particular writing system?" And the IPA does
this too. L: And the IPA has picked the most
common salient points on the space in terms
of whether it's near
the front or the back, and also whether the
lips are rounded or not. So the difference
between /i/ and the French /y/, that front
rounded vowel, the only difference is that
your lips are brought
together in a rounded – G: Making a circle!
L: – thing or not. Yeah. G: Yeah, so the
IPA does take this international perspective,
so when you're learning the IPA vowels, if
you speak, you know, literally any other language
that uses
the Roman alphabet, Spanish being one of them
or Italian or something, the regular-looking
vowels in the IPA look very familiar. So you'll
have, like, "café" is a perfectly good IPA
word except for the "C" at the beginning,
because "C" is weird. But the "a" and the
"é" are IPA-ish. Whereas "coffee" gets written
completely differently in IPA because they're
like, "Look, English did this weird thing
in the Middle Ages, but we're not going to
do it like that for an international standard."
Which means that it's really
weird as an English speaker, because you learn
to read IPA and you're like, "Wow, this is
so weird and difficult!" And then you try
to read IPA Spanish and you're like, "This
is strangely easy and I'm suspicious of
how easy it is." L: And it's because when
you use more than just the five vowels and
"Y" that we have in our writing
system (and "W") you begin to realise that
English has way more than five vowels. English
has, like,
twelve vowels, which makes it – G: Or fourteen!
Depends on the dialect! L: Or fourteen, depending
on how much merging are doing. Which makes
it one of the largest vowel
inventories cross-linguistically. G: Yeah!
So, English has a pretty normal amount of
consonants, but it's got a very large vowel
inventory because it has this weird split
with the long vowels
where they all became completely different,
weird vowels. So a language like Arabic is
generally considered to have three
vowels, /a/, /i/, and /u/. L: Yep. G: And
then it also has long versions of all of those.
But that's still really kind of three vowels
plus length. L: A lot of Australian Indigenous
languages have only three vowels, but what
that means is that there's a lot more variation
in how you can pronounce them. So if you
only have an /i/, /a/,
and /o/, your /a/ could be, like, anywhere
– it's a much larger house that it's living
in in the
vowel space. And there's a lot more variation
in how people pronounce it. Whereas for a
language like English,
you've got to fit fourteen vowels into the
same space and so you have to make much clearer
distinctions between them. G: Yeah, and the
same thing is true
in Arabic, like there's – it has some consonants
that English doesn't have. So you have siin
and Saad, which are two
different "S" sounds. L: Yep. G: But what
they did for me when I was learning Arabic,
perceptually as an English speaker, is they
really change the vowel
quality around it. So if you had /si/ – if
you had the kind of regular "S" with an /i/
vowel, it would be like /si/. But if you had
it with the the other kind of "S" with the
/i/ vowel, it would be more like /sɛ/. It
would bring the /i/ down. And you'd write
the /i/ the same way it was the "S" that was
officially different, but when I was trying
to wrap my head around this I was like, "Wow,
I can really easily hear this
difference between where the vowels are, it's
just that vowels aren't officially part of
this system." L: Yep. And they've got much
more – they've got a bigger house to move
around in. G: Yeah, so
they've got more elbow room, and when you're
coming from a language that makes fewer vowel
distinctions and trying to learn a whole bunch
of them, now you've got to carve up this piece
that you're really
not used to dealing with at all. L: Most important
question I think we have to ask for this episode,
Gretchen: What's
your favourite vowel? G: I really like /y/,
like the French or German – it's like /i/
but your lips are rounded – /y/ sound. L:
It's a good one. G: It's so good! Because
it's not an English-y vowel, but it's easy
to describe to English speakers? Because you
can very mechanically produce an /i/ /u/
/y/ – "Oh, okay! It's there!" And it just
sounds so cool, it sounds very, I don't know,
flute-like. L: Yeah! It's a good one. G:
What's your favourite vowel? L: Well, I mean,
obviously, given that it is the Superlinguo
logo, have a bit of an affinity for schwa.
G: Mmm. L: I think we need to do a whole schwa
episode. G: We do. L: It's a pretty good vowel.
G: It's a great vowel,
and it's so weird. L: It has some really interesting
properties. It, uh, yeah. I just really like
it, and I like that, you know – G: So schwa's
the vowel in, like, "sofa" or "potato." L:
Yeah. It looks like an upside down "e". G:
Yeah. L: And I think I like that about it,
it was like the first non-general Latin alphabet
vowel that
made sense to me. G: Yeah. And one of the
cool things about vowels as a space is that
languages tend to make efficient use of the
space. So you get a fair number of languages
that have five vowels or have
three vowels, and when a language has just
five or three vowels, it tends to be the same
ones. So it's either
/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, or it's /i/, /u/,
/a/. Because you're trying to occupy all different
corners very efficiently. L: Yeah. Useful
if you want
to design a naturalistic conlang to know this
fact. G: Yeah. L: We also have a whole bunch
of vowel-related
links. I once made a cross-stitched schwa,
I've made schwa gingerbread – it's a bit
of a reoccurring theme for me... G: There's
this
really excellent embroidery of all of the
different – so there's a set of key words
called the Wells Lexical Sets which are specific
words that you can use to talk about specific
vowels, because it's gonna
get hard to say, like, "the /a/ vowel" or
"the /i/ vowel." So you have, like, "foot"
and "strut" and "goose" to talk
about /ʊ/ and /ʌ/ and /u/. L: Yeah. We made
them into a set with emoji, but someone made
a really beautiful cross-stitch with different
animals. G: Someone made a really
beautiful cross-stitch of it, somebody else
also dressed up as all of the different Wells
Lexical Sets for Halloween. L: Last Halloween,
that was great. G: She got her whole department,
everybody dressed up as a
different, you know, a goose and these kinds
of things. L: Yep. G: And so those are really
good. So vowels have a bit of a meme-ish quality
as well as their
serious acoustic quality. L: Yeah. Check out
the links. [Music] G: For more Lingthusiasm
and links to all the things mentioned in this
episode, go to
lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on
iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or
wherever else you get your podcasts, and you
can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA
scarves and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch.
I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter,
and my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. L:
I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. To listen
to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistic
questions, and help us keep the show ad-free,
go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm, or follow
the links from our website. Current bonus
topics include conlangs, the semantics of
sandwiches, language games, and hypercorrection.
And you could help us pick the next topic
by becoming a patron. If you can't
afford to pledge, that is okay too because
we really appreciate if you can rate us on
iTunes, or recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone
who needs a little more linguistics in their
life. G:
Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen
McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer
is Claire, our editorial
producer is Emily, and our production assistant
is Celine. And our music is by The Triangles.
L: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
