By Eoin O’Carroll, CSMonitor.com / June 4, 2010
If the Scripps National Spelling Bee teaches us anything, it’s that the English language is a complete mess.
The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw is said to have joked that the word “fish” could legitimately be spelled “ghoti,” by using the “gh” sound from “enough,” the “o” sound from “women,” and the “ti” sound from “action.”
Shaw was probably not the originator of this joke, but he was one of a long line of people who thought that the English language’s anarchic spelling, a hodgepodge of Germanic, French, Greek, and Latin, was desperately in need of reform.
To this end, he willed a portion of his estate toward the development of a new phonetic script. The result was the Shavian alphabet, whose 47 letters have a one-to-one phonetic correspondence with sounds in the English language. Like just about every other attempt to rein in English spelling, Shaw’s alphabet continues to be widely ignored to this day.
But spelling-reform advocates press on. The Associated Press reported that this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee was picketed by four protesters, some dressed in bee costumes, who distributed buttons reading “Enuf is enuf. Enough is too much.”
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Tags: English
Posted in Language history, Phonetics | No Comments »
ScienceDaily (July 16, 2009) — A new way to classify sounds in some human languages may solve a problem that has plagued linguists for nearly 100 years–how to accurately describe click sounds distinct to certain African languages.
Cornell University professor Amanda Miller and her colleagues recently used new high-speed, ultrasound imaging of the human tongue to precisely categorize sounds produced by the N|uu language speakers of southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert. The research potentially could change how linguists describe “click languages” and help speech scientists understand the physics of speech production.
The African languages studied by Miller use a series of consonants called “clicks” which are unlike most consonants in that they are produced with air going into the mouth rather than out. The N|uu clicks, produced using both the front and back of the tongue, are difficult to characterize.
“When we say ‘k’ or ‘t,’ the sound is produced by air breathing out of our lungs,” said Miller. “But click sounds are produced by breathing in and creating suction within a cavity formed between the front and back parts of the tongue. While linguists knew this, most didn’t want to accept it was something people controlled.” So they loosely classified these click consonants using imprecise groupings.
“For nearly a century, some of these sounds fell into an imprecise catch-all category that included every type of modification ever reported in a click language,” said Miller. “The movements of the tongue at the front of the mouth were quite accurately classified. But tongue movements at the back part of the mouth were not classified properly.”
(more…)
Tags: N|uu
Posted in Endangered languages, Linguistics, Phonetics | No Comments »
