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Transcript Episode 26: Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? Palatalization

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 26: Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? Palatalization. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 26 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics! I'm Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: And I'm Lauren Gawne, and today, we're getting enthusiastic about palatalisation. That is to say, “What the heck is going on with G and C?” But first, thanks to everyone for your enthusiastic recommending during our November Recommend-A-Thon.

Gretchen: Yes, thanks so much for all your tweets, and posts, and shares, and all of the new people that you've brought in with you to listen to Lingthusiasm.

Lauren: We will be thanking every one of you who made some kind of public declaration about their love of Lingthusiasm. We'll give you until the end of the month to add yourself to that esteemed group of people, so we can thank you all in our annual anniversary post.

Gretchen: Yes, so you have till the end of November 2018 to be part of this year's Recommend-A-Thon thank you post, which will live in perpetuity on our website. Last year we thanked 100 people. This year, I think we can thank even more. I'm really excited by what we've seen so far.

Lauren: I'm feeling very confident about that. And of course, you can continue to recommend us to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life any time of the year.

Gretchen: I also want to thank everybody who came out to the live shows.

Lauren: Yay! I'm not gonna lie, we're recording this before the live shows.

Gretchen: So we're really hoping people actually come.

Lauren: We are just going to have to assume that they were an absolute rolling success.

Gretchen: We're recording well in advance at the moment to make sure that we have episodes for when Lauren's on leave. We're very excited about those live shows. I assume they were great. Thanks so much to everyone who came out in Melbourne and Sydney. It was so fun to get to see those cities. We also want to remind you that if you're thinking about getting Lingthusiasm merch for any linguists or language enthusiasts in your life, if you want to get someone a scarf with the International Phonetic Alphabet, or tree symbol diagrams on them, or a tie with the IPA on it, or various baby outfits, or T-shirts that say, “Not judging your grammar, just analysing it,” or many other things, now is a great time to place an order so that arrives towards the end of the year.

Lauren: Remember, it's also totally okay to use this as a list of suggestions for other people to buy you, or if you enjoy doing a bit of holiday shopping for yourself, we're not gonna stop you.

Gretchen: We definitely noticed from last year that RedBubble typically runs some sales this time of year, so hopefully, you can take advantage of those to get you and/or your friends and family some great Lingthusiasm swag.

Lauren: Speaking of the holiday season, it's a very important holiday season coming up that's the Northern Hemisphere winter conference season, which I'm usually excited about. Not doing so much travel this year.

Gretchen: Well, the Australian Linguistic Society is also having its annual meeting in Adelaide in December, which I'm going to be at because I'm still in Australia. Our latest Patreon bonus episode is all about the academic conference circuit and how to make it work for you.

Lauren: I had a lot of fun in this episode. This is all of mine and Gretchen's favourite survival tips for navigating academic conferences. If you've never been to one before, or you've only been to a couple, they're lots of fun, and they can be even more fun.

Gretchen: Yes, so you can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to check those out, or lingthusiasm.com/merch for the merch. We’ll repeat those links at the end of the episode, so you don't have to write them down now.

[Music]

Gretchen: So, G and C are really weird letters because they're these two letters that, in a whole bunch of languages, often come with multiple sounds. You have the sounds in their names like /dʒ/ and /s/, and then you have other sounds like /g/ and /k/, and then even more sounds. These letters are so weird.

Lauren: I'm not known for being the most reliable when it comes to a spelling bee, and I feel like it's often letters like G and C that trip me up because they have so many different pronunciation disguises that they put on.

Gretchen: They really do. They especially do that in different languages. You can do a brief sample of this through different languages' words for “cheese.”

Lauren: Ooo, let's do a cross-linguistic cheese platter!

Gretchen: Cross-linguistic cheese tour! First, we have the Latin “caseus” (/kaseʊs/) meaning “cheese.” And this gives rise to a whole bunch of other words for “cheese” in different languages. You have English “cheese” (/tʃi:z/), you have German “Käse” (/ke:zə/), you have Spanish “queso” (/keso/).

Lauren: Yeah. Because I was like, “Well, in Italian you have ‘formaggio,’” which is like a completely different historical word. But then I remembered that my favourite Italian pasta from Rome is cacio (/katʃo/) e pepe and that's – the Italian-Latin word for “cheese” is still hidden in that very excellent pasta dish.

Gretchen: And then because I started thinking about this, I was looking up other languages’ word for “cheese,” and I saw the Dutch “kaas” (/kɑːs/), which, I don't speak any Dutch, but there's one Dutch word that I know which is “pindakaas,” and “pindakaas” literally translates as “peanut cheese.”

Lauren: Oh. Oh, hang on. Like peanut butter?

Gretchen: Yeah, so the Dutch word for “peanut butter” is literally translated as “peanut cheese,” which at first seems like, “This is maybe an interesting dish,” but then you're like, “Is ‘peanut butter’ really any better as a term for it?” Because it's still a dairy metaphor.

Lauren: Yeah, because I was like, “That's a weird choice,” but actually, it's not that different.

Gretchen: It's really not that different at all. Especially, if you think of a cream cheese, which is like a creamier cheese, maybe? Peanut butter is kind of creamy sometimes.

Lauren: I'm still gonna eat it no matter what it's called.

Gretchen: Then you have Irish “cáis” (/kɑːʃ/), which is also from Latin “caseus”. “Caseus” is spelled with a C and an S. They're pronounced /k/ and /s/.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: But “cheese” takes that initial /k/ and makes it /tʃ/. “Käse” and “queso” and “cacio” keep that initial /k/ sound at the beginning, but “cacio” changes the /s/ into /tʃ/.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Dutch keeps it the way it was. And then Irish also changes the second one into “cáis” (/kɑːʃ/). Different languages have taken this one word that seemed like it had a fairly straightforward pronunciation and altered it in slightly different ways.

Lauren: I was trying to make a cheese metaphor about things, like, fermenting and going funky with age, but I guess this is why we’re a linguistics podcast and not a food podcast.

Gretchen: “Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a food podcast about linguistics.” And this is all this weird stuff that C gets up to between different languages, historically, and in different languages in the modern era. G does the same type of thing. If you were a kid, you might have learned about hard G and soft G, or hard C and soft C.

Lauren: I really struggle with the idea of hard C and soft C, and hard G and soft G. Just to help other people who might as well, hard G is the /g/ sound and soft G is when it's used more like /ʒ/.

Gretchen: Yes, /ʒ/ or /dʒ/, which is one of the reasons why this terminology is not generally linguist-approved.

Lauren: Yeah, I just – I think about, for example, when I was chatting with Suzy Styles on the work we do about how we have this cross-sensory idea and “hard” and “soft” as a metaphor just don't work for me for those sounds. Apologies if I leave Gretchen to do all of the explaining the difference between them today.

Gretchen: Well, I don't think I'm really going to use the terms either. I'm just gonna mention the specific sound because you see when it happens cross-linguistically, there's a lot more going on than just that. These are two letters that both have that hard-soft thing going on. We don't talk about “hard Q” and “soft Q,” or “hard P” and “soft P.”

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So why do these letters come in hard and soft versions, even if you can't remember which version is which? To do this, we need to also go back to the Romans.

Lauren: Yes, there were simpler times back in Old Latin.

Gretchen: The Latin alphabet comes from Greek, as a lot of people know. But this is one of things that always puzzled me as a kid – because I was a kid who was into the Greek alphabet – I was like, “Look, the Greeks have this letter, kappa, which stands for the K sound, and it looks like a K, and it's where we get the modern K. And they have this letter, gamma, which was very clearly supposed to be a G. Who invented the C? Why is it there, and why does it cause me so much trouble?”

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: It turns out that this is explained by the Etruscans, who were people that didn't make a distinction between the /g/ sound and the /k/ sound, like the sound in “gamma” and the sound in “kappa.” They borrowed the Greek alphabet for their language, which we don't know very much about, but we know that they didn't care about the difference between gamma and kappa because they just borrowed one, which was gamma, and they used it for both because it didn't really matter for them. Then, the Romans actually didn't initially borrow their alphabet from the Greeks. They borrowed it from the Etruscans.

Lauren: Because the Etruscans were living on the Italian peninsula, so they just borrowed it from the locals.

Gretchen: Yeah, so they just borrowed it from the locals.

Lauren: I do love an ethically locally sourced alphabet, personally.

Gretchen: Nice, locally sourced alphabet. We have fragments of pottery from the Etruscans, but we don't know a whole lot about their language. We know it wasn't Indo-European because all the Indo-European languages do distinguish between the gamma and the kappa sounds. So the Romans borrow it from the Etruscans, and then they're left with like, “Oh, geez, we actually do want to make this distinction between these two sounds that we have, but the Etruscans don't have.”

Lauren: And so someone invented the letter G.

Gretchen: Like an actual person?

Lauren: Apparently. I mean, I'm quoting from Wikipedia.

Gretchen: Do we know their name?

Lauren: Apparently, his name was Spurius Carvilius Ruga, which definitely doesn't sound like a spurious name at all.

Gretchen: That's a really spurious name. So he invented the letter G?

Lauren: Yeah, so at this point the letter C was the third letter in the alphabet, still, and he was like, “Well, look, we have this /k/ sound.” K wasn't cool anymore as a letter to represent /k/. They were all using the rounded – what we think of as C now. He was like, “We need to make more of a distinction.” And so apparently – there are people who disagree with this, but I like this story about young Spurius – created the letter G and was like, “Now, we can make the distinction again.”

Gretchen: If you look at a capital G, it just looks like a C with an extra stroke added on to it, right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: A gamma is like a right angle in the top left corner (Γ), and then you can curve it to make a C, and then you can add an extra stroke to make the G.

Lauren: So that's where the Romans got to. And he popped it in the alphabet in the seventh position, which is originally where a little Greek letter known as "zeta" used to live.

Gretchen: So is he responsible for the demotion of zeta as well?

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, well, no, Z also wasn't cool anymore, because the Romans didn't need it, so they never really borrowed it from the Greeks. Because, again, they got all their alphabet from the Etruscans. So the Romans weren't really down with –

Gretchen: Oh, that’s it. Okay.

Lauren: – zeta. They kind of had it there. He's was like, “Well, let's just drop that letter out, and we'll add this cool, new G thing that I invented.”

Gretchen: So he kicked out zeta and replaced it with G?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: That's great. I love that. Latin actually pronounced – all of their C’s and G’s were /k/ and /g/.

Lauren: Imagine doing a Latin spelling bee. It would be so great. I mean, I guess that’s why they don’t have spelling bees in most languages that have regular orthographies.

Gretchen: Yeah, so easy! You know, you have your classic Latin phrase "veni vidi vici" (/weni widi wiki/) “I came. I saw. I conquered.”

Lauren: I like that you’ve used the original Latin pronunciation there, so you sound a little bit ridiculous.

Gretchen: I'd always pronounced this /vɛni vidi vitʃi/, but then I had a Latin teacher who told me, “No, no, it's actually /weni widi wiki/," and it just sounds so foolish.

Lauren: Yes, every time I hear it. So that "vici" is the C – what we think of as C – being pronounced as /k/, as in the word for “cheese.”

Gretchen: Then, in Late Latin, everything starts to go wrong. And by “wrong,” I mean “great.”

Lauren: For the Empire as well as the language.

Gretchen: Yeah, the Empire was a bit messed up. But also the language started fragmenting and becoming all these different versions. In many of the different areas, people started pronouncing the C and the G in a different way, sometimes.

Lauren: I love the “sometimes” bit. We talk about the environment that sounds are in can make them change, adds a bit of context. And that's really where the fun and the messiness of language can really play out, when you have language changing over time.

Gretchen: Yeah, we need to talk about a particular area of the mouth. This is the roof of your mouth. I'm touching it right now, but you can't see me, because it's inside. This isn’t gonna be a very useful demonstration.

Lauren: If you have clean-enough hands, and you don't mind looking a bit ridiculous in public, you can turn the tip of your finger up to the ceiling and press it into the roof of your mouth or use your tongue.

Gretchen: This is the back part of the roof of your mouth. Not the front bit right behind your teeth, but the back bit by your molars. There's kind of a little lump there. This is known in linguistics as the “palate.” There's a whole bunch of sounds that involve the palate and involve some sort of constriction at the palate, the back part of the roof of your mouth.

Lauren: It's a big chunk of space. You've got that soft bit further towards the back that you might not want to prod if you have a sensitive gag reflex.

Gretchen: Yeah, we don’t advise that.

Lauren: And you have that hard bit closer to the teeth. There's a lot of space to play with there.

Gretchen: Yeah, so there's a lot of space. You can drop your jaw and let a lot of space happen there. What's crucial about the palate is it's a space where you can make both vowels and consonants. You could make an /i/ sound, and your tongue will be towards your palate. You can make a /j/ sound, and your tongue will be towards your palate. You could make a /ʃ/ sound, and your tongue will be towards your palate.

Lauren: I'm just sitting here quietly going “sh, sh, sh” to myself.

Gretchen: I was teaching a roomful of Intro to Linguistics students about the palate, and I was saying, “Okay, we're gonna make a distinction between where S is produced, which is towards the front of the roof of your mouth –" and we don't call that the “palate,” we we use the “palate” just refer to the back part of the roof of your mouth – “and the /ʃ/ sound, which is on the palate or near the palate." I was getting the room to say “sss,” “shh,” “sss,” “shh,” back and forth. Then, I was like, “You guys thought you were enrolled in Intro to Linguistics, but you're actually enrolled in Intro to Parseltongue.”

Lauren: The very “sss-shh”-y sounds of the snake language of Harry Potter, for the three of you out there who aren't familiar. If you don't feel like making these sounds, or you want to see what other people's tongues are doing, as always with these episodes, I'm linking you to one of my favourite websites, which is where they stuck a bunch of phoneticians in an MRI machine, and you can see their tongues doing all these things, if you just click on the column of sounds called Palatals.

Gretchen: That's great. I like that website so much. So the palatals, and the /dʒ/ sound is also towards the palatals. At least it's a lot more similar to the palatals than /k/ and /g/.

Lauren: In contrast, /k/ and /g/ are made a bit further back from the palate, closer towards the back of the mouth.

Gretchen: If you’re just thinking about these palatal sounds, the thing is that because there are both vowels and consonants that can be palatal, and you have a vowel that's produced near the palate, and a consonant near it, the vowel tends to attract the consonant and make it more palatal and make it more similar to each other, because humans like to be efficient about these things.

Lauren: Even if you don't remember any terminology, and you certainly don't have to, the takeaway here is that our mouths are very good at being lazy, and they will strive to do as little moving as possible. It's like, “If I'm already there for the vowel, why am I taking myself all the way to the back of the palate? I'm just gonna hang here.” I'm always happy to celebrate laziness.

Gretchen: These palatal vowels, these vowels that are produced near the palate, tend to pull certain consonants with them. This is what happened to the /k/ and the /g/ sound.

Lauren: And it didn't necessarily happen the same way in all the different languages that descend from Latin.

Gretchen: Right, so in French, which is probably the most familiar to English because we borrowed a lot of words from French – so, sometimes you have /k/ becoming /s/ in English from Latin, sometimes you have it becoming /tʃ/ in English from Latin. You have things like “caseus” becoming “cheese,” but also something like “circus" (/kirkus/) becoming “circus” (/sɝkəs/). All those /k/’s get pulled more towards the roof of the mouth.

Lauren: But only if the vowel is luring them there, right? If the vowel isn't near that palatal bit, if the vowel is already back where the /k/ is, then it just stays there.

Gretchen: Yeah, so that's the thing. In a word like “circus” the /k/ is before an I, which was pronounced /i/, /sirkus/, whereas, the second C is before a U and that one stays /sirkus/, not /sirsus/.

Lauren: I like how I’m like, “/sirkus/ sounds completely normal. /sirsus/ sounds very wrong.”

Gretchen: Yeah, /sirsus/ is just like, “No, that didn't happen.” So, /i/ and /e/, which became I and E in English, are the ones that tend to pull the consonants towards them. Whereas /u/ and /o/ and /a/ are the ones that let the constant stay where they want to be.

Lauren: Which solves a mystery of – I mean, spelling bees are entirely mysterious to me, as I think we've established – but it solves that mystery of spelling bees, because I was always like, “Why would you ask...” – because you can ask in a spelling bee the origin of a word. And so if you ask like, “I have to spell the word 'circus.' Please, spelling bee master, tell me the origin of the word.” If I know it's a Latin word, like, “Well, that means it probably is C-I and not K-I, because originally it was probably /kirkus/”

Gretchen: Yeah, because you don't have K's in Latinate words because all of their C's changed when they were in front of an I or an E.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: This also explains why there's some disagreement about how to pronounce the word “Celtic.”

Lauren: Oh, yeah, there's a really great post by Stan Carey that goes into the history of this, but – I don't know. I have to think really hard if I say /kɛltɪk/ or /sɛltɪk/. But I think I say /kɛltɪk/.

Gretchen: I definitely say /kɛltɪk/, but there's some sports team that's correctly pronounced /sɛltɪk/, because that's what people say when they talk about the sports team?

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: I've definitely heard people say /sɛltɪk/. This is one of those ones where if you're obeying the Latinate rules, you're like, “Well, C-E, that must mean that the C is pronounced like an S.” And yet – because when Irish and Scottish Gaelics borrowed the Latin alphabet, it also hadn't had this sound change happen yet. All the C's were still pronounced like /k/, so all of the C's in Gaelic are hard. And so “Celt” /kɛlt/ is – there's no K in Gaelic. The C's are all pronounced /k/.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: So if you use the Gaelic pronunciation, then it's /kɛlt/, but if you're looking at it, and you're like, “Well, but I thought my rule was the C gets pronounced like S," then it's /sɛlt/.

Lauren: Which brings us to another major scandal in terms of how words are pronounced, which is, of course, the word that I say as /dʒɪbəɹɪʃ/ (gibberish).

Gretchen: And the word that I said on a previous episode as /gɪbəɹɪʃ/ because – I don't know. Why not say it that way?

Lauren: Yeah, I – to be honest – had not paid much attention to your pronunciation, but we had quite a few people draw attention to the fact that we have different pronunciations for this word.

Gretchen: Yeah, and this is the same thing like with /dʒɪf/ and /gɪf/ (GIF) where –

Lauren: Which is definitely not a major argument at all.

Gretchen: No, no one cares about that one on the internet. I've never heard any argument about it. With the G's, when we get a word from French, or from Latin, or from Italian, or sometimes from Spanish – but generally, Spanish, that's its own thing – we tend to pronounce that G as a /dʒ/ or a /ʒ/ like in “rouge.” But when we get it from a different language, we often pronounce it as a /g/ instead.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So of course, when we get it from an acronym like with GIF, all bets are off, really. There's no statistical bias in either direction.

Lauren: We have been talking exclusively about C and G, but they are not the only letters that cause me grief with spelling, which is fundamentally about palatalisation. There are other sounds in English that are also very attracted to the palate.

Gretchen: Yeah, and these are both /t/ and /d/, T and D, and /s/ and /z/, or S and Z. They're pronounced more towards the front of the palate, but, again, if they're in front of an /i/ or an /e/ sound, they tend to get pulled back towards the palate instead of pulled forward. They all get pulled toward the centre of the mouth.

Lauren: The palate is like the black hole at the centre of the mouth universe.

Gretchen: It's got gravity pulling everything towards it. Yeah, it's a very attractive place. I think it's also kind of a very easy place to say because it's just right there in the middle. So it could be anything. You don't have to go to a lot of effort to make it happen.

Lauren: Yeah, the tongue is just kind of going straight up from its neutral spot. What kind of examples do we see with these letters?

Gretchen: There's some ones that are really old that are embedded into English spelling, words like “station” and “ratio” with that T-I-O-N ending. They were at one point pronounced like /statiʌn/ and /ratio/.

Lauren: Again, would have made spelling tests a lot easier.

Gretchen: Way easier, /ratio/! The Romans said this. But /ratʃio/, /io/ gets shortened into /raʃio/ or /steʃiʌn/ and eventually gets /steʃʌn/ and /reʃio/, and other words like that. Then there's also some that are super new, and they're not even reflected in standard English spelling. They're only in representations of informal speech. That's the words like "didja?"

Lauren: As in, “Didja find out any good facts about palatalisation? Yes, I did.”

Gretchen: Yeah! If you have “did” and “you” – well, “you” can become “ya,” obviously. Then that "ya" sound, the Y at the beginning, it's also palatal, so it can pull the D towards /dɪdʒə/. I went to . a really great restaurant when I was in New York City a couple months ago, which was pointed out to me by someone on Twitter as a linguistically interesting restaurant that I should go to. It is called “Jeet Jet.”

Lauren: “Jeet Jet?”

Gretchen: “Jeet Jet,” spelled J-E-E-T J-E-T.

Lauren: Oh, as in, “Did you eat yet?”

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: “Jeet Jet.”

Gretchen: “Jeet Jet?”

Lauren: That was great. Everything is just lapsing into the palatal centre.

Gretchen: So palatal! It's a palatal palace of food.

Lauren: This is why we're not a food podcast.

Gretchen: Every so often when I used to mark linguistics papers for Intro to Linguistics, you’d get somebody who would write – instead of “palatal,” they'd write “palatial.”

Lauren: Did you draw a little palace?

Gretchen: It sounds like it’s a little palace! But also, why is it not “palatial” because “palatial” is actually the palatised version of “palatal?”

Lauren: It makes sense. We might have to let the language kick on for another couple of centuries to let that process happen.

Gretchen: What's really cool about palatals is that they keep going with the trajectories of the language. In French and Italian, the C's and G's became /dʒ/and /ʒ/ and /ʃ/ and /s/, and that's pretty well-established. In Spanish, they did this other thing. The Spanish C in front of E or I went to /θ/ in Spain, like "cerveza" (/θerbeθa/), and to /s/ in South America like /serbesa/. The J, and G, and also the X – they’re now like a /h/ sound, like in "Xavier” (/havier/). But they stopped for a while at a /ʃ/ sound. For a while, this X in Spanish was pronounced /ʃ/.

Lauren: Hmm, just hung out there for a while?

Gretchen: Yeah, you can see that trajectory happening. It happened at a very specific point in Spanish history, because this point when X was being pronounced /ʃ/ also happened right around when the Spanish conquerors were first coming in contact with Nahuatl speakers in Central America. In Nahuatl, there was a sound /ʃ/, and the Spanish speakers were like, “Well, we have a letter to represent /ʃ/. It's an X. We're going to use the X to represent /ʃ/ like we do in our own language.” They transcribed certain Nahuatl words, like the word “Mexico” – /meʃiko/ – perfectly reasonably.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: But then Spanish kept changing, and not a lot of people spoke Nahuatl, and so /meʃiko/ became /mehiko/, because the X sound was shifted from /ʃ/ to /h/.

Lauren: And so “Mexico,” did the pronunciation of it – just went with it even though it was meant to be /ʃ/?

Gretchen: A representation of the Nahuatl word.

Lauren: Ah, there you go.

Gretchen: Other languages looked at it – like English looked at the spelling of this word and said, “Well, you have an X there. We have an X.”

Lauren: “We pronounce it /ks/."

Gretchen: “Here's how we pronounce the X.” And this is where we get /mɛksɪko/, but it's actually an attempt at representing this Nahuatl sound, but then Spanish changed out from under it.

Lauren: It reminds me of when “Beijing” was updated from the older word, “Peking.” We still have “Peking” in “Peking Duck,” and you have that /k/ there in the “-king.” When it was updated, it becomes “-jing,” because over the centuries since it was originally written down, palatalisation has occurred in Mandarin Chinese.

Gretchen: Oh, that's so good! I just thought the Europeans are really incompetent at transcribing things.

Lauren: I mean, the Europeans were pretty incompetent, and I'm sure that was part of the problem. But you actually have that palatalisation happening in Mandarin as well. It's not just an Indo-European phenomenon.

Gretchen: Oh, so there's just a sound change happening in Mandarin as well at the same time. That's so good.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: There's also a really interesting historical example of other languages doing palatalisation, because once you can spot palatalisation, you can find it everywhere. It's in so many languages. I'd be honestly more surprised to find a language that had never done any sort of palatalisation – that hadn’t done it – than I would be surprised to find it in another language. Bantu languages, which are spoken in a wide swath of Africa, they have a set of prefixes that go at the beginning of certain nouns and verbs to indicate which category the nouns belong to, in a very, very simple explanation of that. One of these prefixes is used before a noun to make it the language related to that noun.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: So you have things like – in the Congo, the language that’s spoken is Kikongo.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: In Rwanda, the language that’s spoken is Kinyarwanda. In Botswana, the language that spoken is Setswana. What's really interesting here is that this prefix, you can tell it's started out as /ki/, but in some languages it's become /tʃi/ or /ʃi/ or /si/ or /se/. You can tell that's because this palatal vowel has brought it more towards the vowel. So you have Kiswahili, but isiZulu or isiXhosa], or Tshivenda. Some of them still have the /ki/, some of them have changed it to /si/ or /tʃi/. You can see this relationship because they all have the same prefix, but it's changed differently because the sound changes have happened differently in the different languages.

Lauren: Exactly the same set of changes as we get with our cheeses of Europe.

Gretchen: The same cheese-changes. I have a very vivid memory about when I first learned about palatalisation. This was when I went to Scottish Gaelic summer camp when I was 10 or 12?

Lauren: The thing is we don't have summer camps in Australia. So I find all summer camps mysterious. I'm like, “Of course, you went on summer camp for Gaelic. Like, that's that weird thing that North Americans do. They go on summer camp.”

Gretchen: It is not very common to go on summer camp for Gaelic. Most of the other kids that were there, were there to learn, like, fiddle, or step dance, or something, which is still fairly rare. Most people go, like, canoeing or something.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: But I was a budding linguist, and I wanted to learn Gaelic. So when I was learning Gaelic, they told me about this distinction between broad vowels and slender vowels. This is super important in Gaelic and in Irish as well, because a whole bunch of consonants in Gaelic change the way they're pronounced depending on which vowels they’re next to.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: So you end up with all these silent vowels where the vowel itself is silent, but it's just being used to tell you how to pronounce the consonant that it's next to.

Lauren: This is a bit like when I realised the reason you don't hear, in Spanish or in English – the word “guitar,” you don't hear that U – is because Spanish uses U in the same way there, to indicate that it should be a /g/ and not a /ʒɪtɑɹ/.

Gretchen: Exactly, it means the same U that's in, like, "Guillaume" to indicate that that is a /g/ – or in “guerre,” “guerrilla,” for “war.”

Lauren: Yeah, it was a complete revelation for me when I was like, “I'm not meant to – the U is just there to help me, not to hinder me.”

Gretchen: Yeah, it's to help you according to a completely different system that you only understand incompletely.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: This is the same thing for Gaelic. If you have a word, “fáilte,” which is the word for "welcome," and the last two letters are T-E, the way you know that that T is pronounced like a /tʃ/ is because there's an E next to it. Or if you have names like “Sean,” or “Sinead,” or “Siobhan,” the way that you know that that S is pronounced like a /ʃ/ is because it has an E or an I next to it.

Lauren: Just, like, “Come with me towards the palate.”

Gretchen: This is the kind of thing that they teach you in Gaelic 101. They’re like, “Here's the broad vowels. Here's the slender vowels. Here's why they're so important,” because they tell you how to do this with all your consonants. And yet, afterwards, I was like, “But English also kind of does this. Because if you have a word like “circus,” the way that you know how each of the C's is pronounced is based on the same distinction between what Gaelic traditionally calls “broad” and “slender” vowels, but we can call “palatal” or “non-palatal” vowels. The slender vowels in Gaelic are the same thing as a palatal vowel, or a front vowel to use the proper linguistic term. All of those are the same class of things that all cause the same types of sound changes. The “broad” vowels, or the “non-palatal” vowels, or the “back” vowels are all the same category of stuff that doesn't cause the sound change. And that totally rocked my world when I figured it out the first time.

Lauren: I think the thing is, given my general spelling issues, even though I have trouble with spelling, I really appreciate that palatalisation makes pronouncing things easier. In many ways, it's really great that the writing system we have captures this history of how these sounds were all the way back to Latin, all the way back to our friend Spurius, and they're there to help us.

Gretchen: Yeah, it makes certain connections easier to see. A word like “electric,” “electricity,” the C is still there, and when you add an I on to it with the “-ity” ending, you can see it change pronunciation. You can see the connections between those words more straightforwardly. Whereas, if there was a K at the end, you wouldn't necessarily know that it was one that was going to change its pronunciation if an I was added to it. I think what fascinates me about palatalisation is it's one of the ways in which linguistics lets us peer deeply into the soul of a language, or into history of a language, and into the connections between languages, and lets us think of these things that we think of as messy and anomalous as actually a unified part of our shared anatomy across all of the spoken languages that we have this in common, which is that we all find it easier to pronounce things in a certain area of our mouths the same. That makes us part of this really big human story in what seems to be just annoying ways to spell things.

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Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. We're also now on Spotify, so if you use that, you can find us there. You can follow us at @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. And you can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, and my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. To listen to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistics questions, help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include: hyperforeignisms, multilingual babies, homonyms, and how to have a good time at academic conferences. You could help us pick the next topic by becoming a patron. Can't afford to pledge? That's okay too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life. Especially this month, we're doing our special anniversary round to help the show grow.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producers are A.E. Prévost and Sarah Dopierala, and our editorial manager is Emily Gref, Our production assistants are Celine Yoon and Fabianne Anderberg. Our music is by The Triangles. Stay lingthusiastic!

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