Filología

English has always been, and frustratingly so, a difficult language for me to comprehend. Perhaps due to my own learning style, I only really began to understand English in my second or third year of studying Spanish -- only when we started writing diarios (journal entries).

A friend of mine mentioned yesterday that he glissaded down a hill while mountaineering in Washington state. I find glissade to be such a pleasant word. Glissade is derived from the French glisser, "to slip". I think what I like best is that it is an onomatopoeic word, or a word whose sound describes its meaning. From there, I enjoy the composition of the word itself. I like the sound of the -ss- at the middle, and also the gl- at the beginning.

To digress into nit-picking, I should be able to refer to those two phonemes with something more substantial than their form (e.g., -ss-, gl-). I mean, I did take a Lingusitics 101 class in college, right? It's too bad I didn't find it more interesting at the time.

A lot of a Linguistics 101 class in college talks about phonology, the system of sounds of a language. You learn about minimal pairs (two words whose pronunciation differs only in one sound and are recognized as distinct words), allophones, morphemes, and other basic elements of historical and modern pronunciation. It's a tough subject to follow, in my opinion, but why that is I'm not entirely sure. For me, I wonder if it wasn't because I didn't associate any meaning with those words -- allophone, morpheme -- like I did with, for example, bones in the human body. The idea of a morpheme seemed just a little too distant for me to grasp (Oxford American Dictionary: "a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided [e.g., incoming: in-, -com-, -ing]").

Returning to the idea of why I like the word glissade, I instantly liked glissade when I first read it and said it to myself. Why did I like the word? Well, my first idea was to break it down by phonemes (the part of Linguistics 101 that I did grasp). The trouble is, that's about as far as I got. Phonemes have many forms and are subdivided into consonants and vowels. Additionally, phonemes of consonants are named in accordance with their place of articulation.

Because I didn't retain much from my tutelage in phonetics, I took to searching for -ss- and trying to find the name of the phoneme. Unfortunately, another dead end is my relative inability to read and/or understand the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). (When exactly do people learn the IPA in their lives, really? Is it just linguistics students who do?) In the end, I'm pretty sure that -ss- is a voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative. Sitting at my desk at work, I tried to figure out the correct sounds, trying to make the sound myself and identify the place of articulation.

Try saying glissade and try working out the syllables yourself:

GLI-ssade

Further, break it down by phonemes and pay close attention to the places of articulation:

gl- (This is an affricate, or the sound created by the combination of a plosive and fricative. You will feel your epiglottis close when you make the initial g sound and thereafter feel your tongue slide along your soft palate with the l sound. It is voiced because you use your vocal chords to make the initial sound. It is a glottal stop because your epiglottis closes, thereby cutting off your air supply and making it hard to hold the sound for very long.)

-ss- (Voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative; You will feel the tip of your tongue move to behind your front teeth and, if you hold the sound, you will feel some air escape through your teeth. It is voiceless because you do not use your vocal chords to make the sound. It is a fricative because it is a sound produced by the air flowing through your mouth, and it is also a sibilant because it produces a hissing sound.)

-d (Voiced alveolar plosive; You will feel your tongue hit your palate quickly. I didn't explain what a plosive is after describing the composition of an affricate, but a plosive is the sound of opening up a previously closed oral passage. It is alveolar because the sound is produced using the alveolar bone in the jaw.)

The complete idea of the pronunciation of glissade involves the glottal stop with the gl- and subsequent movement of the air through the mouth with the -ss- and reopening of the epiglottal passage with -d.

When trying to figure out the places of articulation while sitting at my desk at work, I realized just how hard it is to identify what my tongue is doing. Sounds come and go quickly, and it's hard to focus not only on the syllables, but also the tongue movement it takes to make the syllable as well as where one tongue movement ends and the construction of the next syllable begins. The process certainly lends further insight as for the difficulties we have pronouncing many words in foreign languages: just like any other muscle, your tongue may not be trained to carry out the movements necessary to make a given sound.

Oh, and here's the video of said friend in Washington state, glissading 2,000 feet down a mountain.

UPDATE: So, it turns out, it wasn't actually said friend in Washington state in the video, but rather a friend of said friend. I stand corrected!

Ortografía

The other day, I was reading and stopped at the word choice. I stared at it for a few seconds, halfway frustrated with why it stopped me dead in my tracks and halfway befuddled by the way it was spelled. I was fixated on the vowel combination of oi. Is that really normal? Is this really the only way to spell choice?

Eventually, I moved on after my brief bout of self-righteousness. I realized that my thinking that choice was misspelled was my own doing, but I'm unsure why it happened. Why do we sometimes read words and are convinced that they are misspelled?

I started with some research, but it's difficult to get relevant results from a Google search of "think that word is misspelled but is not". I assumed that it had something to do with linguistics, but it's hard to blame linguistics as a whole because it is such a multidisciplinary subject area. With the way my mind works, I wanted to define this happening with the name of a study, thereby making it easier to search for or look up on Wikipedia. No luck.

I ended up arriving to Wikipedia's page on psycholinguistics, as I realized that thinking that a word is misspelled has to be associated with a cognitive process. Psycholinguistics involves major linguistic elements, such as morphology (word structure; morphemes are the smallest units of syntax), syntax (sentence structure), phonology (sound), semantics (word meaning), or orthography (the way words are written), interpreted in terms of the cognitive processes involved with word recognition and reading. For me, my reading of choice had nothing to do with anything but orthography. It seems like much of psycholinguistics involves behavioral studies involving eye movements and reaction times. After fixating on oi and why it looked weird, I wondered if it was the way that the letter combination looked, aesthetically. Responses to orthography can often involve the way that letters look because, on a very basic level, we read shapes, which is why it isn't hard to read that one chain e-mail with words whose letters at the beginning and end were the same, but whose middle letters had been jumbled (e.g, Cmabrigde Uinervtisy). Although, it would seem that the jumbled form of the word needs to resemble its correct form (i.e., it's less obvious that Cbrmagdie Uvtiernsy is really Cambridge University).

Looking up the etymology of choice was an intriguing diversion, as I found that the Modern English choice derives from the Old French chois (v. choisir). Choice was adopted into Old English beginning with the Norman conquest of Britain in the early 11th century and, finally, halfway through the 14th century it properly replaced the previous word for choice, cyre. What I'm still curious about, though, is when the French spelling of chois was changed to the current spelling of choice. I would assume that regardless of the spelling, both words were pronounced the same (IPA: tʃɔɪs; ch ois), as English was still largely phonetic at that time, due to Old English's existence as a Germanic language.

So, I'll write off my confusion regarding the correct way to spell choice as a momentary lapse of orthography and move on. At least the English language is not only frustrating to many and challenging to those who wish to understand it, but also constantly evolving. I'm also glad for articles like this one by Joseph Berger, Struggling to Put the 'Ortho' back in Orthography. Thank goodness for constructive criticism.

Egészségetekre

Pronunciation, to me, has been a source of fascination, intimidation, and triumph. As a child I often pronounced words in many different ways, unwittingly so, and to this day I think about how many ways I pronounced "thanks" and made a fool of myself in front of my third grade classmates. It's much easier for me to reflect on that now that my world of language has been so greatly amplified via time spent overseas and multilingual friends. Now that I live in Washington, D.C., I hear a variety of languages but often I can identify them. I'm perplexed by this; I probably give myself too much credit and am grateful for having watched so many European films. Yet, I wonder if I only notice the languages because I have heard them before. The sounds of Swedish are not so uncommon to me now that I have begun to admire the films of Ingmar Bergman. In fact, I am pretty sure that I had swedes standing next to me on a Metro platform the other day; it's not because I understood at all what they were saying, but rather because the sounds and the rhythm of the language sounded weirdly familiar. And I heard the couple say jo (djo:) - the Swedish word for "yes".

However, this recognition of other languages and my ability to produce the same sounds has reaffirmed my above mentioned perspective on pronunciation. It seems that the biggest reason that a lot of people I meet don't speak foreign languages is not because they aren't interested, but because pronouncing words is a source of anxiety. The loss of naïveté is a rough moment and in the past year I've had a couple of instances in which I have realized that, plainly, I don't pronounce things as well as I think I do. This is not a bad thing. I know that French is a very hard language to speak and of the little French I speak, I thought that I was able to pronounce things decently well. After speaking French with two Frenchmen and having them correct my pronunciation errors, I realized that it's difficult to judge one's own pronunciation. Granted, I am critical of myself because I hold my pronunciation to high standards. Still, it was strange to realize that there is an interesting relationship between how I think I am pronouncing something and how it actually sounds to someone else. Case in point: Ikea.

When exiting Ikea it is hard to miss the sign that explains how to say "good-bye" in Swedish: hej då. There's a phonetic spelling on the wall that explains that the 'e' in hej is pronounced with a long a sound; yet, for the longest time I thought I was saying it correctly by saying something along the lines of haa dau. I didn't realize that I had been pronouncing it wrong until recently, when a friend explained how to pronounce it. It occurred to me that I had fooled myself. The phonetic spelling on the wall reads ha: do: (or, better put, haa dau) and intends for English speakers to recognize that the way to pronounce the Swedish word hej closely mirrors the pronunciation of the English word hay (perhaps also hey). Thus, it incorporates a long (English) a sound.

To avoid completely losing my audience, I'll digress for a moment.

The Spanish language has taught me a lot about vowel pronunciation. In Spanish, a phonetic language, the pronunciation of every word can be inferred by simply pronouncing every letter of the word. That said, the sounds of letters don't change unless they are accented, in which case the sounds are made longer. I learned how to pronounce the vowels a, e, and i by teaching myself that the pronunciation of the Spanish a mirrors the way English speakers say the a in law. The Spanish e sounds very much like the a in bay, and the i sounds like the e in me. Or, rather, the pronunciation English vowel a has been split into two vowels in Spanish, a and e, and the pronunciation of the English e is the how one pronounces the Spanish i.

In Spanish:
a = a in 'law'
e = a in 'bay'
i = e in 'me'

To return to the explanation of why I had been pronouncing hej då wrong, I realized that I had been pronouncing this foreign word by unconsciously pronouncing the vowels as if I were speaking Spanish. When I saw the phonetic spelling ha: do: I said the a based upon how I would say the a in Spanish and thought that I was correct. I had been told previously that I pronounce most words in other languages with as if I were speaking Spanish, but it was really funny to me to finally realize how true that was. It has taught me a lot about how we judge our pronunciation; it deviates from our ability to recognize what we have convinced ourselves is right and that which actually is.