Month 13.3. Shapes in sounds.

This is the second of two blog entries about the English language. In this entry, I propose a way in which the sounds of English may be changing.

I begin by offering you a crash course in phonetics, the study of speech sounds. Linguists, who are not particularly known for their visual art skills, will teach you that the human mouth looks like this:

Let me see if I can illustrate this cryptic diagram a bit better.

So the trapezoid-thing represents the space in your mouth. Your tongue moves around to produce different vowel sounds. There are sounds like “oh” and “ah” that are pronounced with your tongue in the back of the mouth. Sounds like “ee” are pronounced with the tongue forward and raised. If you say out loud right now, “Ah-eh-ee” without pausing between the sounds, you can feel your tongue raise. Linguists illustrate the “position” of certain sounds in the mouth using the trapezoid.

There is a special alphabet of symbols used to represent sounds. Sometimes, the sound-symbol is the same as the letter. For example, the symbol [o] designates the sound “oh.” Shocking. The square brackets indicate that o is being used not as a letter, but as a symbol representing the sound “oh.” The symbols for other vowel sounds in English are easy enough to grasp. [i] designates “ee,” as in tree. The symbol [e] demonstrates wait, and [ε] is for wet. [ɑ] is for rod, [o] is for rode, and [u] is for rude. Finally [æ] is for bat.

To illustrate the location of the tongue for different sounds, we chart the vowel-symbols into our trapezoid-mouth:

So [i] is pronounced with the tongue high and fronted, [u] with the tongue high and back, and so on. (Sorry but the blog changed the [ɑ] to ?)

The grand proposal of this humble blogger is that the pronunciation of American English vowels is changing – in a way that looks pretty in the trapezoid-mouth! It goes like this:

Actually there’s a term for the above diagram. Students learn it in historical linguistics (the study of how language changes). It’s called a push-pull phenomenon, and it’s already happened once in the history of English. What happens is that the sound [u] becomes more like [o], then [o] becomes like [ɑ], which becomes like [æ], which becomes like [ε], which becomes like [i]. There is circular rotation amongst the vowels.

Let’s explain. Say we start pronouncing the word rude more like rode. Then we have two words pronounced the same, but meaning different things: rode meaning “impolite,” and rode meaning “moved in a vehicle.” We want to maintain the distinction, so we start pronouncing the original word rode like rod. In other words, the [u] sound in rude “pushed out” the [o] from its space in the trapezoid. Words that were once pronounced with a [u] sound become pronounced with [o] instead (thus rude > rode). Words pronounced with [o] become pronounced with [ɑ]: rode > rod.

The process continues. We’ve begun pronouncing the original word rode “moved in a vehicle” like rod. But rod is already a word. So to get rid of the ambiguity, we start pronouncing the original rod like rad. But that’s also a word (as in, “That’s rad, dude”). So we start pronouncing rad like red. That’s already a word, so we pronounce red like rid. That’s a word, so rid becomes reed. Then reed becomes something like rude. This is called a “vowel shift.” The example I gave is hypothetical. But vowel shifts really have happened. They are the reason we have the following word pairs which have the vowel [a] in English but [u] in German: round-rund, hound-hund, mouth-Mund, pound-Pfund. The original sound was [u], which is still present in German but which has shifted to an [a] sound in English.

The amazing thing is not that vowels change. What’s amazing is that they change in an ordered way, even though speakers are unconscious of the change. My proposal is that a vowel change is happening in American English. Specifically, the vowels are undergoing a circular rotation around the trapezoid-mouth.

For now, we can only hear the vowel shift in a few words. The gay guy on Glee says “colture,” not “culture.” The u has become [o]. Americans say, “I gat so angry…” not “I got….” The [ɑ] has become [æ]. The name “Sarah” has become “Serah.” The [æ] is turning into [ε]. Americans say “mint” rather than “meant.” The [ε] is becoming [i]. So we have u > o > ɑ > æ > ε > i. Plot this transformation in the trapezoid-mouth, and you’ll see. The circle is being put together.

According to the literature in historical linguistics, vowel shifts begin with a few words being pronounced differently. Like Sarah > Serah and the other examples above. Eventually these changes spread to all words, so yeah > yeh, bad > bed, etc. Once all words have undergone the change, the vowel shift is complete. This can take a few decades or a few centuries. But one day, rode really will mean “impolite.”

If you’ve actually gotten this far in my blog entry, here’s a final geographical note. Canada has not fully caught on to the rotational vowel change I’ve argued for. Quebec English has resisted it. I spoke to some British Columbians recently, and they didn’t have it. On the other hand, people from Southern Ontario do talk like Americans. Draw what conclusions you like. But I hope you now see that there are more interesting differences to be discussed than that blasted about vs aboot.