Glottal stop, clipping and elision

I got into a conversation with somebody on Twitter yesterday about the phonetic processes. To be truthful, it wasn’t much of a conversation and rather a question asked by them followed by my monologue with possible answers. They wanted to know ‘’what term refers to the process of dropping the last letter of one word when it is the same beginning letter of the following word’’. Now, the question itself confused me slightly since we don’t really omit letters but sounds. That led me to think that they aren’t aware of very basics of phonetics and suggested glottal stop which wouldn’t strictly answer their question (glottal stop doesn’t really have much to do with whatever sound that follows it) but then again nothing would answer their question since like I said it’s all about sounds rather than letters. Thinking, on the other hand, that perhaps they really meant letters I walked away from phonetics suggesting clipping (I explain the term clipping in one of my previous posts but will remind you shortly what it is). It turns out, as somebody else finally got it, the term they were looking for was elision. Now, what do these three terms mean and what processes are there associated with them?

Glottal stop plosive – type of sound used in numerous languages in their spoken versions that is produced when the flow of air from our lungs is stopped by the closing glottis. It can be represented for example by the apostrophe but it is not a written phoneme in English (to see what a phoneme is look up one of my previous posts Phones, phonemes and allophones). In English glottal stops occur before a tautosyllabic (when two or more phonemes occur in the same syllable) voiceless plosive (in English the following sounds are voiceless plosives: /p t k/) in words such as tha’t, ca’t, ro’t, sto’p (sounds, yes sounds rather than letters, /t/ and /p/ in those examples are glottal stops and can’t be heard when words are pronounced).

Clipping – word formation process based on reduction of a word to a part of it, also known as shortening. There are different types of clipping depending on what part of word remains (back clipping, middle clipping, fore-clipping and complex clipping). E.g. advertisement – ad, information – info.

Elision – omission of a sound (consonant, vowel or syllable) in words where doing so makes them easier to pronounce or sometimes used as a stylistic device in poetry and suchlike.  E.g. ‘cause rather than because and who’s rather than who is.

 

Avoid common mistakes in English - Part 2

Lurking from within Twitter a vicious little creature gazes into my eyes and provokes me to fight it. I have stumbled across him twice today already and many, many times in the past. The misuse of homonyms, my old friend whom I partially hate and partially await to see, almost expecting people to fire it at me. To read about homonyms look up one of my previous articles. One of numerous examples of homonyms are the words affect and effect. Even though they’re similar they carry different meanings.

Affect or Effect?
To affect is a verb and means to influence something or somebody. Effect is a noun which means something that was brought by a cause. A synonym for effect is result. Look at the following example:

Princess Diana's death affected me deeply or: Princess Diana’s death had a deep effect on me.

To effect on the other hand is a verb too although used rarely and means to accomplish something e.g. I’m trying to effect a change in the way we use English.

Two/to/too and There/their/they're
Other examples of homonyms are two/to/too and there/their/they're.Two is a quantifier and simply means 2. To is a preposition and toomeans as well as. Look at the following: I have two brothers who go to school and I go to school too. There indicates location, their means belonging to them and they’re stands for they are e.g. Their sandwiches are there and they’re going to eat them.

Do you speak Simlish?

The Sims

A strategic computer game developed by Maxis, designed by Will Wright and published by Electronic Arts has become not only the best life-simulation computer game ever produced but also the best-selling PC game in history. The Sims, first released in early 2000, has since then published seven expansion packs and 2 sequels selling over 6.4 million copies worldwide in total. Being a fan of The Sims myself I could go on about how unique it is, explain the gameplay and so forth, however, I am here to talk about a very specific aspect of it all - Simlish.

Why not a real language?

The characters you play with, Sims, perform only certain actions and talk about only certain things with other Sims. Presumably they would sound very repetitive if spoke a language known to the player. Also hiring translators and voice-over actors for the players from other parts of the world would result in higher production costs. Nevertheless communication between the Sims is the crucial part of the game and so they needed to speak. A fictional Simlish was born.

Language influences

It is said that the Native American code talkers of World War II inspired the creators of the game who then started experimenting not only with Navajo language in order to create Simlish but also with Ukrainian, French, Finnish, Latin and English. As a result, however, Simlish ended up as total gibberish that can’t be possibly translated and is often referred to as nonsense language. Personally I hear elements of the English-like flow in Simlish, this probably resulting in American voice-actors, Gerri Lawlor and Stephen Kearin recording their voices for the game.

Not only talking

You can hear Simlish not only when Sims are talking but also when they’re listening to music. A number of real artists have recorded versions of their songs in Simlish, including Black Eyed Peas, Depeche Mode, Lilly Allen, Katy Perry, Natasha Bedingfield, Paramore, Nelly Furtado, My Chemical Romance and many more. At high zoom levels text on book covers and magazines can be seen. The Simlish alphabet seems like nonsense characters. Any resemblance to real characters is unlikely.

Do you speak Simlish?

There are people who claim to have learnt some of the Simlish language after noting phrases they heard while playing the game and then guessing their meaning based on the situation those were said in. I highly doubt this is a task possible to complete. Perhaps Simlish is deliberately vague and people with an imagination more fanciful than mine are reading more into it than they should.

Why do we swear?

Why do we get upset about swear words?
The expression of profane language has been the main legal battleground of free speech for the last century. You can easily switch on your TV any night during the week and hear comedians impugning the competency of the political and religious leaders of the world without worrying about consequences they could face if they lived a few centuries before. This is a sign of great progress in the history of humanity and I must say we live, luckily, in the age of freedom of speech. Well, we do except when it comes to certain words. Why?!

Why do we want to swear?
This isn’t at all an easy question and to even approach answering it you must  know a few ways in which people tend to swear:

• Abusive swearing – used specifically to humiliate and insult somebody. Those can mostly relate to excrement such as you piece of shit, you asshole, shove it up your ass or sexuality such as motherfucker (incest) and wanker (masturbation).
• Dysphemistic swearing – an euphemism is a substitution for an expression that suggests something unpleasant to the listener whereas a dysphemism has the opposite logic and is used when the speaker wants you to think how hideous something is. Excrement is part of our lives and you like it or not, you can’t get through without having to mention it. Then again people don’t want to think of it and they make up synonyms to protect themselves. We have general terms like waste, medical like bowel movement, formal like excrement, terms we use with kids like poo and many more. What’s crucial is that you can’t use these terms interchangeably. This is why the doctor won’t say they need your poo samples and similarly you won’t ask your kids if they need to defecate.
• Reaction swearing - This is when, during a romantic evening, the topic of conversation suddenly changes to dignifying sexual activities or religion after you just spilled red wine on your new trousers and you yell shit, fuck or Jesus or combinations of the three. If you’re Polish remember that even though you exclaim kurwa  when you stub your toe you wouldn’t shout whore in English after you injured yourself or you would sound really silly!
• Habitual swearing – bizarre constructions such as what the fuck where swear words are used purely for their shock value rather than meaning, often overused by speakers.

What kind of concepts are sources of negative emotions?
Anyone who speaks a foreign language knows that the kind of things we swear about vary in different languages. If you risk translating swear words literally from language to language results can be often comical. Nevertheless, there are universal concepts – categories in which most of the world’s swear words fall into:

• Excretions and associated organs (piss, shit, ass) Those are all strong words and the reason why is that epidemiologists consider many diseases to be spread through our bodily fluids. In old English language you could curse somebody by saying a pox on you and in Polish for instance you can swear by shouting cholera.
• Sexuality and associated organs (fuck, dick, cunt) Why is it a source of negative thought if sex itself is pleasurable? It isn’t when you consider all negative aspects of sexuality such as prostitution, incest, child abuse and rape. Those are no small matter to humanity, are controversial and for that reason continue to be emotionally charged.
• Religion based (Jesus, hell, damn). Those is nowadays moderately mild way of swearing unless in more religious societies, especially Catholic societies, like where I grew up, in Poland.

What happens in the brain when you hear or say a swear word?
The answer to that question is buried deep in the neurobiology. Swearing activates the areas of our brain associated with negative emotions concentrated in the right hemisphere. A very interesting feature of the neurobiology of swearing is that swearing is processed involuntary only which means you can’t chose to ignore a certain word in terms of the inevitable arousal that is associated with it. To prove that theory saying things are processed automatically in our brain there’s a simple test to use in sociology. My former teacher tried this on the group of students, including me, and the results were rather surprising. The task was to simply name the colour in which the word on the board is printed. ‘’Don’t read it’’ – he said – ‘’Ignore what it spells but just pay attention to the colour’’. Black, green, red, blue… Even though the task requires you to ignore what the word spells, try as you might, you can’t do it after a lifetime of literacy. Our brains process words automatically. It means that swearing forces the listener to think unpleasant thoughts.

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When the same is different

If the words are pronounced the same but have different spelling and meanings we refer to them as homonyms e.g. seas - sees.

Types of homonyms:

• Homophones are words that have exactly the same pronunciations and same or different spelling and different meanings.
• Heterophones are words that are spelt the same but have different pronunciations and meanings

Types of homophones:

• Homographs- words that may sound alike and are spelt the same but have different meanings e.g. number – meaning more numb or numerical value and bear – the teddy or to carry (these are in fact also homonyms). Additionally, heteronyms are specific types of homographs with the same spelling but different pronunciations and meanings e.g. sewer (one who sews) and sewer (from sewage) or  record (noun) and record (verb).
• Heterographs – words that sound alike while spelt differently and have different meanings e.g to (preposition) and two (number), hour and our.

Synonyms are different words with the same meanings e.g. maybe and perhaps whereas a polyseme is a word with multiple meanings e.g. to get.

Craziness and oddity of the English language

It just makes no sense!
Seriously, what’s wrong with people? Why are we so clumsy with expressing our thoughts and why do we speak in such odd ways about the physical world surrounding us? Think about it: you fill the form in by filling it out! If hairs is plural of hair then why a man with hair on his head has more than a man with hairs on his head? Why is it called after dark when it’s really after light? Things we claim are under water or under ground are in fact surrounded by water or ground rather than under it. A theory of physics must be imbedded somewhere deep in our language, some indistinct and very rough concept of space in prepositions and an awkward concept of matter in nouns. Understanding this theory helps us explain not only the oddities of our language but also the mental models that we use desperately in our struggle to make sense of our lives.

Space in language
Location in language is somewhat digitised. I sense it from the simple fact that we make binary distinctions like near - far, on - off, in - out, on – under while scale is relative – we can use the same special term across about a spider walking across a window sill and a boat travelling across Pacific even if in first case the scale is centimetres, the other it’s thousands of miles. For the same reasons the interpretation of the special term there may vary. Saying the book is there I could possibly mean the book is in another room or in another country.

3 D’s
When you think of it, shape is schematic. In reality all objects take up some three-dimensional arrangements of matter but language idealises them as essentially one-dimensional, two-dimensional or three-dimensional. For example we don’t think of a CD as short cylinder, three-dimensional object, even though that’s all it is in reality. We think and talk about it as it was only two-dimensional. Well, hold on, isn’t it that in other words we choose to ignore some of the dimensions that make it up in reality concentrating on the smaller number of dimensions that sum it up in our minds? Yes, sounds about right.  It goes into some general sense of shape – We make it so much easier for ourselves by thinking simply of what shapes are similar to other shapes on the basis of comparison.

Prepositions and nouns
What’s important is that this idealised schematic geometry rules the use of our prepositions e.g. we use the preposition along in connection with one-dimensional objects only – therefore along the line is correct but along the table isn’t because we perceive table as a surface and a two-dimensional object. We can, however, say along the edge of a table and here’s another quirk about language of shape. For some reason the boundaries of objects are treated as if they were objects themselves. Edge is the one-dimensional boundary of the two dimensional table (I hope you are still with me because I think I’m close to losing it myself). For similar reasons we say something is under water when in fact all we mean that it is surrounded by water. Water can be refer to as to two-dimensional surface of a body of water so objects can be, in fact, under that two-dimensional surface.

Split infinitives

The infinitive of a verb is purely its most basic form and the one that can be found in the dictionary with no subject indicated. In English it always follows the word to e.g. to do, to play, to sing etc. A split infinitive is an infinitive in which the word to is separated from its verb by other words e.g. instead of saying I decided never to work we say I decided to never work. Traditionally spilt infinitives have been fought by linguists for centuries and considered grammatically incorrect but today most of them have agreed split infinitives are allowed in both writing and speech. Hurray! No need to go through writing some oddly shaped sentences in order to avoid the split. There was no rational basis and no justification for anyone to forbid splitting infinitives since not only in spoken language but sometimes even in written English it is so much clearer and natural to do so. Bear in mind, however, split infinitives should be avoided in formal writing unless the alternative seems too awkward. Normally we move the offending word so that it comes either before or after the infinitive.

My mum told me to quickly open the window.

My mum told me to open the window quickly.

You used to secretly message me.

You used to message me secretly.

In some cases, it is extremely odd to avoid splitting the infinitive and it’s much better to stick to the version with the split. In fact there are a few writers who have stated that in certain cases avoiding the split infinitive is impossible and that some modifiers must separate the to from the verb e.g. That was the only way to more than double his salary.