Say, “aaaaaahhhh.....” Now try going smoothly from one vowel to another, without pausing: “aaaaaaaeeeeeeeiiiiiii”. Feel how your tongue moves in relation to the back of the roof of your mouth as you move from one vowel to the next. When you say “ahhhh” like at the dentist, your tongue is low and far back and your mouth is all the way open. If you say “cheeeeese” like in a photo, your tongue is higher up and further forward, and your mouth is more closed: it’s a lot harder for the dentist to see your molars.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explain how the position of our tongue when we make vowels can be described in the shape of a trapezoid: it can go up and down, forward towards the teeth and backwards towards the throat, and there’s a bit more space for movement higher up towards the roof of your mouth.
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Announcements:
Vowels don’t just exist in a trapezoid, they move around inside it: sometimes they squish up against their neighbours, sometimes they expand into less-occupied corners of the trapezoid for more elbow room. These vowel gymnastics explain so many things: why is the first letter in the alphabet named “ay” in English, but “ah” in most other languages that use the Roman alphabet? Why is “e” in “coffee” pronounced one way and “cafe” another, when they’re clearly related? Why is English spelling so difficult? What’s the difference between a California accent and a Kiwi accent? It’s all about VOWEL SHIFTS.
This month’s Patreon bonus episode is about constructing languages for fun and learning.
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
Pink trombone (note: link makes sound!)
Using lollypops to explore vowels
Vowel space in the face (from Wuglife)
IPA vowels with keywords
pin/pen merger (Dialect blog)
The Great Vowel Shift
New Zealand vowel shift
Californian vowel shift
SNL skit with Californian vowels
Best of Bret McKenzie - Flight of the Conchords
Australian Indigenous Languages with three-vowel systems
Number of vowels in a language (WALS map)
Some more vowels:
All of the English vowels
GIF of a tongue moving in the vowel space
Bernie Sanders vowel trapezoid animated video
Vowel jokes
Vowel space tattoo
Embroidered Wells lexical set
Wells lexical set as emoji, in the vowel space
Emoji IPA vowels
Cardinal vowels cross-stitch
Cardinal vowels original Daniel Jones recording
Schwa cross-stitch
Schwa cookie-cutter (3D print your own)
Nasal vowels
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Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Emily Gref, our production assistant is Celine Yoon, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 17: Vowel Gymnastics. 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 17 shownotes page.
[Music]
Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gawne.
Gretchen: And I'm Gretchen McCulloch. And today we are all over the place with vowel gymnastics! But first! Our monthly Patreon episode this month is about conlangs, so you can listen to us talk about people who create languages and the process of creating languages, and support the show by going to patreon.com/lingthusiasm, and listen to that and all the previous bonus episodes there.
Lauren: We have, like, ten bonus recorded episodes now, and all of our bonus episodes from this point on are full-length episodes, so you get two full Lingthusiasm episodes for the price of one Patreon subscription, and if you can't support the Patreon, as always you get the monthly free episode here on SoundCloud or wherever else you get your podcasts.
Gretchen: And thanks so much to everybody who's doing that already.
[Music]
Gretchen: So. Vowels.
Lauren: Human voices are amazing. Like, the fact that we communicate by speech is this amazing process that's basically that humans are giant meat tubes, and we make air go through those tubes to make sounds. But that's disgusting, and that's why we call it phonetics instead of meat tubes.
Gretchen: Meat tube science?
Lauren: The science of meat tubes and air! So, we kind of push air through, and then we have different parts of our vocal tract, so our – what we think of as voice box and our mouth, and all the things in our mouth, to kind of change –
Gretchen: And especially our tongue!
Lauren: – especially our tongue! – changes the way the air flows, and that changes the quality of the sound. And so all of this that we're saying now is based on that outflow of air, but it's how we stop and change and shape the air that makes different sounds!
Gretchen: So, you have a mouth. You're listening to this, you've got a mouth. You've got a tongue in it. That's kind of weird. Your tongue has a certain amount of space that it can move within your mouth. So, you start from behind your teeth – your tongue can be kind of up there.
Lauren: Nnn... if you are not pulling funny faces to yourself on the train, you're not doing this right.
Gretchen: I'm pulling funny faces right now, I can't even talk 'cause I'm trying to act it out! You can go down a bit, so you can go down below your lower teeth.
Lauren: [mumbled] Has a really great effect.
Gretchen: You can go back – go back in the kind of, like, dentist move, like, "Open your mouth as wide as you can and say aaaah!"
Lauren: Aaaah!
Gretchen: Aaaah! And then you can go kind of back up as far – like, to the top of the roof of your mouth at the back – and [garbled] and you have it up here. You know, maybe you can hear me sounding kind of weird, that's 'cause I'm trying to act it out. You should act it out! You're sitting here anyway, you've got the time, what else are you doing with it? Don't answer that.
Lauren: Just let a big – especially if you're in public, just let a big bunch of air go and go, "Eeeaaaaayyooooauuugh." Kind of. Move that tongue around.
Gretchen: Eeeaaaauuuooo. And you can go backwards, too, you can go, "Aaaeeeeiiii."
Lauren: Hours of fun.
Gretchen: Hours of fun! What's cool about this is that the vowels – we think about them as distinct, like there's this vowel and there's that vowel, there's /i/ and there's /a/, but they're on a continuum. And when you drop your jaw in a vowel position, you can sliiiide down from one vowel to the next. Or you can slide back up when you raise your jaw again.
Lauren: Eeeaaaaaiiiieeee.
Gretchen: Or ooooouuuaaaaaa.
Lauren: That was a good one.
Gretchen: Yeah! Yeah, that was a different one. So you can do "aaaoooouuuu." And you can also slide front and back, so you can go "iiiieeeeeaaaa."
Lauren: Iiiiieeeeeaaaa? It sounds like I'm asking a question.
Gretchen: Or "ooooeeeeeuuuu."
Lauren: Okay. So we can move all around in that space.
Gretchen: And when linguists talk about this space, we talk about vowels as existing in a trapezoid, which, in case you've forgotten your grade-school geometry, a trapezoid is kind of like a square, right, but the top bits are more pushed out so it looks like either a triangle that's been chopped off, or a square that's been stretched on one side.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: And the top bit of the trapezoid, the part that represents the roof your mouth, is wider and has more stuff potentially going on in it because you have more space in the roof of your mouth than you do on the bottom part of your jaw.
Lauren: We will make sure that there's a picture that has one of these abstracted trapezoids overlaid on an actual face so you can kind of get an idea what we're getting at here.
Gretchen: Yeah, so definitely check out the show notes to make sure you get the picture. But there is an abstract picture, and you can visualise it in your mouth in three-dimensional space. It doesn't really matter it's really mostly two-dimensional, because there's not much of a difference in terms of what you do on the left side of your mouth or the right side of your mouth, you're going to produce the same vowels. That's not something that languages do, that people do.
Lauren: We're nice and symmetrical when it comes to that part.
Gretchen: Yeah. There's also this very, very cool website which is called Pink Trombone.
Lauren: I guess because like that slide – I mean, we were doing basically trombone impersonations, you kind of sliiide between things.
Gretchen: And it'll give you a model vocal tract and you can slide the tongue around and you can listen to it make the vowels as you slide the tongue into different positions.
Lauren: You can play the old meat tube.
Gretchen: But you also possess your own and you can play around with it, and pay attention to what your tongue is doing, because normally, like, we figure all this stuff out when we're babies. Like, you don't think about it, you've forgotten it. And so you can think about, like, what's your tongue doing? If you leave this episode and you –
Lauren: If you leave this episode without thinking about how disgusting tongues are, you've done very, very well.
Gretchen: Yep.
Lauren: Congratulations.
Gretchen: Uh, no, you've done poorly, you should be thinking about how weird tongues are! So what's cool about this trapezoid and the fact that vowels are points on a continuum rather then discrete objects – you know, there's a big difference between /p/ and /t/ because you have to put your lips and your tongue in very different positions for those. But the difference between /i/ and /e/ is really more a question of degree rather than kind. It's all part of this kind of nebulous vowel space.
Lauren: Yeah, consonants are often – not always, but often – a lot more locked-in, you're either one or the other.
Gretchen: Whereas vowels go all over the place! And they are so weird! And cool. And if you want to practice getting a sense of just how weird your tongue is, one of my favourite things to do with students, which I stole from, I think, the linguist Jessi Grieser on Facebook – hi Jessi, if you're listening! – is to get students to put a lollipop on your tongue, kind of on the back part of your tongue, and make a bunch of vowels. And you can feel the lollipop moving and the stick coming out, and you're like, "Oh, the stick is moving forward and backwards!" And so you can see where it's going and see how it moves.
Lauren: That is tastier than every other way of gaining phonetic data that I know about.
Gretchen: So, if you're very, very lucky and you're enrolled in an Intro Linguistics class, maybe one day you'll get a lollipop and get to play around with vowels with it.
Lauren: Take your own! Like, "I'm here in Intro to Phonetics!"
Gretchen: DIY the lollipop. When I first heard about this I was like, "Well, I'm at home, I don't have any lollipops, what am I going to do?" So I ended up getting a gummy candy and sticking a toothpick in it? It worked okay!
Lauren: That's good fieldwork improvisation.
Gretchen: Yeah, at first I tried it with a toothbrush, but the toothbrush was too heavy and it kept falling out of my mouth.
Lauren: Mmm.
Gretchen: And it didn't stick 'cause it wasn't, you know, candy enough.
Lauren: It's fuzzy and not made of sugar.
Gretchen: Then I got a toothpick and a gummy bear and it worked okay.
Lauren: So you got a sense of where in your mouth your tongue was as you were doing the different vowels.
Gretchen: Yeah, because it's so unconscious to us, we have to think about the content of what we're saying, we don't often get to drill down and think about the vowels.
Lauren: Yeah. I mean, it's unconscious, but we have this really strong sense of it, because it's vowels that are usually driving the difference between accents.
Gretchen: Mm!
Lauren: You know, both of us have a "P", and we say /p/ more or less the same, and we have an "M" and we say /m/ more or less the same. But it's our vowels that are really, really different. Well, not really, really different, but more different.
Gretchen: Yeah, and so when you're hearing a difference in an accent in somebody, or a different variety of English, you're often hearing a thing that they're doing differently for their vowels. So sometimes you get – especially thinking of the vowel situation as a space is what explains why some sounds become other sounds in particular accents. So there are some varieties of English that have that have what's known as the pin/pen merger.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: So in these varieties you have people say, like, "a sewing pin" and "a writing pin" because those are the same sound to them.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: And the reason that that's possible is because /ɪ/ and /ɛ/, the sounds in "pin" and "pen," they're neighbours in the vowel space.
Lauren: Yeah. Well, they're neighbours for us, but they live in the same share house for people with that merger.
Gretchen: Yeah, exactly! And so because they're neighbours they can also become roommates! They can become – they can glom on to each other and people can say, "Okay, this is actually just one space for me."
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And it's all this sound that's kind of halfway between the two.
Lauren: Or, for example, other people might move them further apart.
Gretchen: Yeah.
Lauren: So, I have generally pretty high vowels? So my /ai/, /i/ vowels are generally higher than yours are.
Gretchen: Huh. Okay, say an example of that. So I have "me," and you have...?
Lauren: So I say "me."
Gretchen: Me. Me. Yeah, I think that is higher in my mouth than – me? Me. Hm. Okay. /i/ You can have lots of fun with your friends and trying to say lots of vowels like this. And so the reason why the pin/pen merger is possible – so you don't get, for example, the pin/pan merger.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: That's not going to happen anywhere, because "-an" is pronounced way at the back of the mouth, it's a lot like your dentist "aaaah". "Paaan." And "pin" is all the way at the front of the mouth and higher against the roof the mouth. So if you have a low back vowel and high front vowel, a lot has to happen in order for them to glom on to each other.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: But if you have two vowels and one is high front and the other one is kind of mid front, then they're pretty close to each other and so it's easy for them to take on the same space. Like, "pin" and "pen" do that.
Lauren: It's actually impressive that we can all speak with slightly different – our vowels existing in slightly different points on the vowel space and we can all accommodate that. It's a really impressive cognitive feat, not only that different people can produce different accents with different vowels, but then people who don't speak that accent, with only generally a little bit of exposure, can kind of figure out what's happening and regularise it in their brain.
Gretchen: Yeah, 'cause it's kind of interesting that we only notice it when something goes wrong? So, if you're saying a word in context where the word is mostly predictable from context and you're hearing what everybody else's vowels are, and what all the other vowels in all the other words are doing, then a word – even with quite a different vowel from how you might say it – is still pretty comprehensible because you're shifting your whole representation of a vowel space in, you know, seconds to accommodate someone else that you're listening to. And then the only time it goes wrong is when you have a word that you just don't have any context for. So this happened to me with New Zealand English, because I was watching Flight of the Conchords.
Lauren: Which is a fabulous show and has some really great New Zealand accents.
Gretchen: Yes. And one of the guys, one of the Conchords, is named Brett, what I would call Brett.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: But of course anything goes with names! Like, anything can be a name, you don't necessarily know how someone's name is going to be spelled just from how they say it and so on.
Lauren: Uh-huh.
Gretchen: And so when he was introducing himself on a show, he'd be like, "My name is [brɪt]." And I was like, your name's what? I don't... I don't have that vowel? Like, surely it maps onto one of my vowels, but I don't know which one!
Lauren: What did you decide it was?
Gretchen: I had to look it up! Like, I didn't – I was like, "Brit like Britney?!" But this guy seems very dudely and I think of that as a woman's name, but maybe it's not? You know, maybe his name is Brit?
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: But nobody else seems surprised about this, so I was like maybe it's not Brit? Like...
Lauren: But after watching the show for long enough, do you think if you then came across them introducing a new character whose name was [dɪb] would you think...
Gretchen: Oh, then I'd be like, "Oh, maybe that's Deb."
Lauren: Yeah, so you would kind of normalise it. You know who's really bad at figuring out vowels across different accents?
Gretchen: Who's that?
Lauren: Computers!
Gretchen: Oh, what's that!
Lauren: We do it so intuitively and without thinking – and it's hard when you come across a new accent that you can learn to accommodate it – that we often forget that speech recognition really, really struggles with this.
Gretchen: It really, really does. Yeah. And so, I don't know, I haven't tried to play a Flight of the Conchords excerpt for Google Assistant or Alexa or Siri or one of these to see how they manage it, but it's probably bad.
Lauren: It's quite possible they would try and call your friend Britney if you asked it to call "Brit."
Gretchen: Ah, yeah, that would be a problem. So, when we create the transcripts for the show, we run the transcripts through YouTube's auto- captioning feature first of all, and then we get a human to fix them because they always need a lot of fixing, but at least it makes it faster. And the YouTube auto-transcriber does have a lot of difficulty with your surname, Lauren! Do you want to say your surname again for us?
Lauren: Hi, I'm Lauren Gawne. Which is different from the past tense verb "gone." So, "I've gone to see Lauren Gawne," they're two different vowels for me.
Gretchen: So is that the same difference that you have between "cot" and "caught," like a bed and the past tense of "catch"?
Lauren: Yes. So: "I caught a cold" and "I bought a cot."
Gretchen: Right! So, when I met Lauren, I was like, "So you have this distinction between the past tense of go and your surname, but I don't think I make this distinction in any other words, because..."
Lauren: So "caught" and "cot" are housemates in your vowel space.
Gretchen: Yeah, they're just joined at the hip, they're the same thing. So, because they're already the same vowel for me, I was like, I don't think I can reconfigure my vowel space, what I need is how can I map your name onto my vowel space, because I'm not going to acquire an Australian accent just so I can say your name.
Lauren: So, like, the lengths you don't go to. So, how would you introduce me to someone?
Gretchen: So I would say, "This is Lauren [Gone]."
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: You know, because that's the accommodation. I said, "Is it okay if I pronounce your name as the past tense of go, because I don't think I have the vowel that you actually use."
Lauren: And of course because we're linguists, that was actually how the conversation went.
Gretchen: Oh, yeah, that's literally what I said!
Lauren: But people just make these accommodations all the time.
Gretchen: Yeah. And one of the things that I think is cool is, you know, vowels can glom on to each other or they can get further apart, become estranged, but this often happens at a level that's not just one individual set of neighbours. Like, if we have a bunch of neighbours and I move into your room and then you're like, "Excuse me, I was occupying this room, you move into the room down the hall, the next one." And then that person's like, "Hi, sorry, I was here!"
Lauren: "I'm sorry, this is my room."
Gretchen: And so I'm gonna occupy this next one. And then eventually we get all the way to the end of the hallway and that person's like, "Excuse me," and so they go back around to the front of the hall and they're like, "Oh, this room seems empty, I guess I'll take it."
Lauren: It's like a giant square dance.
Gretchen: Yeah, yeah! Square dancing, that's a good example. I was trying to think of an analogy before this and I was like, "Dominoes?"
Lauren: Sometimes you'll expect someone to go into the room on the left and they're like, "I'm going to go see if anyone's in this room on the right. Oh, hi, like, you have to get out now." So these mergers and stuff don't occur in isolation. Once one part of the vowel space starts to move, everyone has to start moving to kind of fit in with that. And we've seen it happen many, many – the reason that we have the diversity in accents that we have in English is because this shift has happened several times throughout history and several times in different places, and it's happening right now in some places, which is super exciting!
Gretchen: Yeah, it is! So, the first time that I went to LA and the friend that I was visiting said, "Something you have to understand about Los Angeles is everyone talks about the traffic instead of the weather, 'cause the weather is always nice, and so our small talk conversation is about how the bad the traffic is instead." And I was like, "Sounds weird, but okay." And she said, "No, no, you really have to understand how important it is, there is this whole sketch on Saturday Night Live about people talking about the traffic in California." And I was like, "I have not seen this!" And so she dragged me over to the computer and she pulled up YouTube and she's like, "You need to watch this sketch."
Lauren: This is your social induction into LA.
Gretchen: This is my social induction into LA culture. And so I watched this sketch and I was like, "Ok yes, they are talking about the traffic, but what really interests me about this sketch is the vowels."
Lauren: Of course it did.
Gretchen: I drew her a vowel diagram, I was like, "This is what they're doing!"
Lauren: You're a good friend, Gretchen.
Gretchen: And she was like, "Oh, I think I kind of finally understand what it is you do with linguistics!"
Lauren: So what is happening with Californian vowels? Can you give us a few examples?
Gretchen: Yeah. So you get these people with, you know, their spray tans and so on, and they come in and – there's one line in a clip that I looked up before this, I'll link to a clip if you want to watch a whole longer thing – but the character says something like, "This femily reunion's gonna be hyuge." "Have you cut the cucumbers for the dep yet?" And there's a couple key words in that. There's "femily" for "family." "Femily reunion's gonna be hyuge." And this "hyuge" which is for "huge."
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And there is "dep" for "dip." "Dep" for "dip."
Lauren: "Get the dep."
Gretchen: And what's really interesting is there is a vowel shift that's going on in California right now – it's also happening in Canada, actually, it's like the Canada/California shift?
Lauren: Cool.
Gretchen: Yeah! And it's pushing a bunch of vowels in a particular direction. So it is making the /ɪ/ vowel in "dip" a little bit further down, like /ɪ/ to /ɛ/. And what this skit does, is it says, "We're not just going to take /ɪ/ to /ɛ/ like normal Californians do, we're actually going to take it one step further, we're gonna take it all the way to /a/."
Lauren: So that's why it sounded particularly over-caricatured.
Gretchen: Yeah, so it's an exaggerated version of this vowel shift that California's already doing. And the same thing, that they're going to "hyuge," the /u/ vowel in California is moving towards the front of the mouth, where /ɪ/ was, but instead of just moving it like a little bit forward, /u/ to /ʉ/ –
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: They're going way further forward. "Hyuge." I'm doing vocal fry at the same time, but, you know, you gotta keep your whole feature set together. So what's really interesting about this is, like, I am really sure that no one at SNL got out their vowel chart and was like, "All right. What we really need to do..."
Lauren: Where's the California vowel shift at now? Let's move it one step further.
Gretchen: Let's move it one step further. Let's gather all the actors around, let's explain to them how the vowel system works, and let's tell them, "Okay, every time you were going to say 'dip' you need to say 'dep' and this is why..." I am really sure they did not have a linguist on staff. And yet what they did is actually very linguistically consistent, it's a linguistic exaggeration that is very theoretically sound! And it's because, I'm sure what they actually did is something like someone was like, "Hey, I can make this cool, exaggerated-sounding California accent! Everybody listen to me!" And people were like, "Oh, that sounds fun! Let me imitate it too!" And so you get a bunch of people sitting around being like, "Oh yeah, I can imitate this accent!" And someone was like, "Let's make a sketch making fun of Californians!"
Lauren: And as things move, they don't all – not all vowel shifts shift in the same way. And so, your example with Flight of the Conchords is a really great example. So, "Brett" moves up to "Brit," so it's much higher. And then of course your "dip" kind of sounds are like, "hey, buddy we are here" and in California it goes down and it's still very front, it's /dɛp/.
Gretchen: Yeah, so it's kind of the inverse shift. So, "Brett" to "Brit" and "dip" to "dep" are the opposite of the same thing, and it's sensitive to the same pair of "these two sounds are similar to each other."
Lauren: Yeah. And so while the Californian one went down to "dep," the New Zealand vowel shift goes down to "dup," which is more of an /ə/, or our friend the schwa.
Gretchen: Ahh, because "Brit" is taking up that...
Lauren: So "Brit" has taken up that space. And so Californian English decided to go down to "dep," and New Zealand English has gone down to "dup."
Gretchen: Do you have an example of this in a word?
Lauren: Um, so, "dup." Or the famous shibboleth one for New Zealand English is talking about – instead of ordering "fish and chips" you order "fush and chups."
Gretchen: Ahhh! Fush and chups!
Lauren: Is the uber-stereotyped. But it's that vowel is the main – that little shift that's happening is the main way to distinguish New Zealand and Australian accent.
Gretchen: Yes. So you don't have any "Brits" or "chups."
Lauren: No, we have "Brett" and we have "fish and chips."
Gretchen: But a lot of the rest of the accent is very similar.
Lauren: Yes.
Gretchen: Yeah, so there's your free "How to Tell the Difference Between Australian and New Zealand Accents" feature.
Lauren: And so these have both shifted. The same vowel in California has moved out of the same house as New Zealand, but they've moved into different neighbourhoods after that.
Gretchen: Yeah, they took different paths along the hallway. I'm picturing like a dorm or something, where you have a bunch of rooms along a hall.
Lauren: I'm thinking of the Cluedo board, personally.
Gretchen: Okay! Did you ever play that game called Sorry? I don't know, maybe people call it Trouble? Is this a Canadian thing?
Lauren: Ah, yes, I've played Trouble. Is it called Sorry in Canada? That is the most Canadian board game I've ever heard of.
Gretchen: 'Cause when you knock someone out of their position in the game you have to say "sorry!" But, like, you're not sincere about it.
Lauren: No, only you have to say sorry, you Canadians. We can say, "Ha, you're in trouble!"
Gretchen: No, we're like, "Sorry!" But in a gleeful sense, not in an actually apologetic sense.
Lauren: So it's essentially like a re-skin of Ludo where you move different coloured counters around the board and you enjoy knocking people off the board.
Gretchen: This is why I like talking about vowel gymnastics, because the vowels kind of topple over. They move in a cycle, they move around the whole space. They don't just do these individual, atomised things by themselves. There's also a really cool example of this in the history of English.
Lauren: A really good example, called the Great Vowel Shift. It's pretty great.
Gretchen: It's pretty great. It's the only one that has "great" in the name. All the other ones are named after their locations, the Great Vowel Shift is just, you know, Vowel Shift the Great.
Lauren: And it was great because it really changed the way English around the – between, like, the 1300s and the 1600s? So, this is the reason why Chaucer and Shakespeare sound so different when you read them is because in between, all of the vowels in English really just started moving – systematically, not chaotically – around in the vowel space to the new homes that haven't moved that much since the 1600s.
Gretchen: Yeah, I mean this is also the reason, if you've learned any other language that uses the Roman alphabet, that English spelling is so weird.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: So if you take a word like "coffee" in English, and "coffee" has this "e-e" at the end. And the "e-e" is a very standard English way of spelling the sound /i/. But in Old English, the letter that we now talk about as "e" [i] was pronounced /e/. So a word like "coffee" was pronounced more like "coffay."
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And if that sounds like the word "café", which was borrowed in from French, and French did not have this shift happen, after the shift already happened... so "coffee" and "café", they used to be pronounced basically the same way.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Words like "knee," like the part of your body, were pronounced /kne/. So this /i/ - /e/ relationship – so, the first thing that happens – well, scholars aren't quite sure what order it happened, but let's say for the sake of argument that the /e/ sound pops up to the /i/ sound. So /kne/ becomes "knee".
Lauren: /met/ becomes "meat".
Gretchen: Yeah. And then – so, two things happen, right. So the one thing, the sound that was formerly the /i/ sound is like, "Excuse me! I was here!"
Lauren: Yeah. And so it drops down, it becomes a diphthong, which is /ai/. So this is the letter "I".
Lauren: So a word like /bit/ becomes our word "bite," as in "don't bite that lollipop." And so that /ai/, if you think about what's happening with that /ait/ in "bite," you're going from one part of the vowel space to the other, in the vowel. Compared to something like "bit", which is just a single – you're kind of going to one spot in the vowel space and hanging out there, "bite" is like someone who owns two houses in different neighbourhoods and kind of moves between them.
Gretchen: It's like if I bought the apartment next door and I put half my stuff in one and half the stuff in the other and I was like, "I'm just going to hang out in both of these!"
Lauren: So we have "bite" now, and that's become a diphthong.
Gretchen: Yeah. It's two vowel sounds. And then – now we're down at the bottom and we've got the regular /a/ sound, and it was like, "Yeah, I'm just going to squish forward a little bit to get out of the way of /ai/!" And so you have /æ/, so in a word like –
Lauren: So "mate" was /mat/ and becomes "mate." It gets up and moves out a bit.
Gretchen: Well, yeah, so it moves up into where /e/ was, because /kne/ left that space for it.
Lauren: Yep. We'll have a diagram of this in the show notes.
Gretchen: It's helpful to have the audio for it, but it's hard to visualise! And so, they all moved around. And what's interesting is that – so this is your "coffay," it was around there – and the same thing happened for the back vowels. So a word like "goose" with – so, the double-o letter combination, which we think of as an /u/ in English, like "goose," was at one point pronounced /go:sə/.
Lauren: Hehehe!
Gretchen: Which is amazing.
Lauren: Yup.
Gretchen: And the same thing as like the double-e in "knee" – /kne/, "knee" –
Lauren: /go:sə/.
Gretchen: /go:sə/.
Lauren: Goose.
Gretchen: Goose.
Lauren: Goin' up.
Gretchen: So they both moved up.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: And the actual letter /u/ – well, that one kind of became... it did a bunch of things.
Lauren: Yeah, so not all of them stayed exactly the same, and there were all these other factors involved, but the important thing is vowels started shifting. And they did this on a massive scale, and it changed what we think of as the way English is spoken. And it certainly didn't help with how it was written!
Gretchen: And it had this weird repercussion. So, a lot of people learned in school that English has the long vowels and the short vowels. And the mnemonic that I learned was the long vowels are the ones that say their own name – so "e, a, u, o", those are the ones that say their own name – and the short vowels like /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ and /a/ don't say their own name.
Lauren: Yes.
Gretchen: But that's a weird mnemonic! Why are we calling them long and short for that reason? And it's because –
Lauren: Especially when we've just learnt the word diphthong!
Gretchen: I know! It's because in the history of English, and in many modern languages still currently, there are long and short vowels, and the long vowels are literally pronounced for a longer period of time. That's the difference.
Lauren: Yep. That is the difference.
Gretchen: So if you have something like /bet/ and /be:t/, one of those is just longer. Or hypothetically you have /kne/ and /kne:/.
Lauren: Which is really hard as an English-speaker to get the hang of because you're used to hearing these clear differences in the place, or that they're diphthongs or something like that.
Gretchen: Or /go:s/ and /go::s/.
Lauren: You've made a ridiculous word even more ridiculous.
Gretchen: I'm doing great at this. And so what happened was this change affected only the English long vowels. They shifted. They were all in competition with each other. And the English short vowels stayed pretty much where they were and did pretty much a similar thing. So we used to have these nice pairs of /i/ and /i:/, /e/ and /e:/, /a/ and /a:/. And it was very symmetric. And, you know, it has a little bit of a different sound quality to it, but it was pretty much just the length that made the distinction. And this is what Latin had had, for example. Latin had /a/ and /a:/, /i/ and /i:/. And so Latin was like, "Look, I've got five vowels, they come in long and short versions, but that's pretty easy, so I'm just going to have five vowel letters." And Old English had pretty much five vowels and long and short versions! And so five vowel letters was very reasonable. And then this vowel shift happened and now your long /e:/ is being pronounced /i/, and your long /i:/ being pronounced /ai/, and the short –
Lauren: But you still only got five letters to write it with!
Gretchen: I know! And they have so little relationship with each other except historically!
Lauren: Yup.
Gretchen: And it just – like, that's why English spelling is so completely weird. Partly because of this thing that happened in the Middle Ages when a whole bunch of vowels shifted and we kept writing them the same way, because the writing system was already established. And then, because this thing on top of it where now we have a whole bunch of different varieties of English and a lot of them are undergoing their own separate vowel shifts, and they're still all being written the same way.
Lauren: Which brings us to a really interesting question, which is how does the IPA deal with vowels? Because we have this infinite possibility of spaces where vowels could be, but we have to write them in some way, and obviously the English system is not going to work.
Gretchen: The English system is not going to work. And you do see this sometimes, so sometimes if you see languages that have been written with other writing systems – they get romanised, they have different romanisation versions of them – depending on when that romanisation happened, sometimes the romanisation will use English conventions. So, for example, if you think of the Chinese last name "Lee," sometimes it's written L-E-E, which is using the English convention, that double-e stands for the /i/ sound. And sometimes that same last name is written L-I, which is using a different convention that the letter "I", which in every other language that uses the Roman alphabet, you know, French and Spanish and so on, that's what that letter stands for. So you can look at transcription systems and say, "Okay, was this person using an English perspective or an international, Latin-based perspective when they were romanising this particular writing system?" And the IPA does this too.
Lauren: And the IPA has picked the most common salient points on the space in terms of whether it's near the front or the back, and also whether the lips are rounded or not. So the difference between /i/ and the French /y/, that front rounded vowel, the only difference is that your lips are brought together in a rounded –
Gretchen: Making a circle!
Lauren: – thing or not. Yeah.
Gretchen: Yeah, so the IPA does take this international perspective, so when you're learning the IPA vowels, if you speak, you know, literally any other language that uses the Roman alphabet, Spanish being one of them or Italian or something, the regular-looking vowels in the IPA look very familiar. So you'll have, like, "café" is a perfectly good IPA word except for the "C" at the beginning, because "C" is weird. But the "a" and the "é" are IPA-ish. Whereas "coffee" gets written completely differently in IPA because they're like, "Look, English did this weird thing in the Middle Ages, but we're not going to do it like that for an international standard." Which means that it's really weird as an English speaker, because you learn to read IPA and you're like, "Wow, this is so weird and difficult!" And then you try to read IPA Spanish and you're like, "This is strangely easy and I'm suspicious of how easy it is."
Lauren: And it's because when you use more than just the five vowels and "Y" that we have in our writing system (and "W") you begin to realise that English has way more than five vowels. English has, like, twelve vowels, which makes it –
Gretchen: Or fourteen! Depends on the dialect!
Lauren: Or fourteen, depending on how much merging are doing. Which makes it one of the largest vowel inventories cross-linguistically.
Gretchen: Yeah! So, English has a pretty normal amount of consonants, but it's got a very large vowel inventory because it has this weird split with the long vowels where they all became completely different, weird vowels. So a language like Arabic is generally considered to have three vowels, /a/, /i/, and /u/.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: And then it also has long versions of all of those. But that's still really kind of three vowels plus length.
Lauren: A lot of Australian Indigenous languages have only three vowels, but what that means is that there's a lot more variation in how you can pronounce them. So if you only have an /i/, /a/, and /o/, your /a/ could be, like, anywhere – it's a much larger house that it's living in in the vowel space. And there's a lot more variation in how people pronounce it. Whereas for a language like English, you've got to fit fourteen vowels into the same space and so you have to make much clearer distinctions between them.
Gretchen: Yeah, and the same thing is true in Arabic, like there's – it has some consonants that English doesn't have. So you have siin and Saad, which are two different "S" sounds.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: But what they did for me when I was learning Arabic, perceptually as an English speaker, is they really change the vowel quality around it. So if you had /si/ – if you had the kind of regular "S" with an /i/ vowel, it would be like /si/. But if you had it with the the other kind of "S" with the /i/ vowel, it would be more like /sɛ/. It would bring the /i/ down. And you'd write the /i/ the same way it was the "S" that was officially different, but when I was trying to wrap my head around this I was like, "Wow, I can really easily hear this difference between where the vowels are, it's just that vowels aren't officially part of this system."
Lauren: Yep. And they've got much more – they've got a bigger house to move around in.
Gretchen: Yeah, so they've got more elbow room, and when you're coming from a language that makes fewer vowel distinctions and trying to learn a whole bunch of them, now you've got to carve up this piece that you're really not used to dealing with at all.
Lauren: Most important question I think we have to ask for this episode, Gretchen: What's your favourite vowel?
Gretchen: I really like /y/, like the French or German – it's like /i/ but your lips are rounded – /y/ sound.
Lauren: It's a good one.
Gretchen: It's so good! Because it's not an English-y vowel, but it's easy to describe to English speakers? Because you can very mechanically produce an /i/ /u/ /y/ – "Oh, okay! It's there!" And it just sounds so cool, it sounds very, I don't know, flute-like.
Lauren: Yeah! It's a good one.
Gretchen: What's your favourite vowel?
Lauren: Well, I mean, obviously, given that it is the Superlinguo logo, have a bit of an affinity for schwa.
Gretchen: Mmm.
Lauren: I think we need to do a whole schwa episode.
Gretchen: We do.
Lauren: It's a pretty good vowel.
Gretchen: It's a great vowel, and it's so weird.
Lauren: It has some really interesting properties. It, uh, yeah. I just really like it, and I like that, you know –
Gretchen: So schwa's the vowel in, like, "sofa" or "potato."
Lauren: Yeah. It looks like an upside down "e".
Gretchen: Yeah.
Lauren: And I think I like that about it, it was like the first non-general Latin alphabet vowel that made sense to me.
Gretchen: Yeah. And one of the cool things about vowels as a space is that languages tend to make efficient use of the space. So you get a fair number of languages that have five vowels or have three vowels, and when a language has just five or three vowels, it tends to be the same ones. So it's either /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, or it's /i/, /u/, /a/. Because you're trying to occupy all different corners very efficiently.
Lauren: Yeah. Useful if you want to design a naturalistic conlang to know this fact.
Gretchen: Yeah.
Lauren: We also have a whole bunch of vowel-related links. I once made a cross-stitched schwa, I've made schwa gingerbread – it's a bit of a reoccurring theme for me...
Gretchen: There's this really excellent embroidery of all of the different – so there's a set of key words called the Wells Lexical Sets which are specific words that you can use to talk about specific vowels, because it's gonna get hard to say, like, "the /a/ vowel" or "the /i/ vowel." So you have, like, "foot" and "strut" and "goose" to talk about /ʊ/ and /ʌ/ and /u/.
Lauren: Yeah. We made them into a set with emoji, but someone made a really beautiful cross-stitch with different animals.
Gretchen: Someone made a really beautiful cross-stitch of it, somebody else also dressed up as all of the different Wells Lexical Sets for Halloween.
Lauren: Last Halloween, that was great.
Gretchen: She got her whole department, everybody dressed up as a different, you know, a goose and these kinds of things.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: And so those are really good. So vowels have a bit of a meme-ish quality as well as their serious acoustic quality.
Lauren: Yeah. Check out the links.
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Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, and my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com.
Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. To listen to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistic questions, and help us keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm, or follow the links from our website. Current bonus topics include conlangs, the semantics of sandwiches, language games, and hypercorrection. And you could help us pick the next topic by becoming a patron. If you can't afford to pledge, that is okay too because we really appreciate if you can rate us on iTunes, or recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.
Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire, our editorial producer is Emily, and our production assistant is Celine. And our music is by The Triangles.
Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
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