#vowel charts

[lingthusiasm]

Bonus 85: How we made vowel plots with Bethany Gardner

One major thing that makes accents and languages sound different from each other is in how people pronounce their vowels.  We could examine vowels by training our ears to pay very close attention to these differences, and many linguists have, but another way of getting a new perspective on these vowel distinctions lies in creating visual representations of the precise and subtle variations on how individual people make their vowels. 

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about making visual maps of our own vowel spaces with Dr. Bethany Gardner. Bethany is a recent PhD in psychology and language processing at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA, and importantly for our purposes here, they’re really great at making graphs in R. We talk about Bethany's PhD research on how people learn how to produce and comprehend singular "they", how putting pronouns in bios or nametags makes it easier for people to use them consistently, and how the massive amounts of data they were wrangling as a result of this led them to become good at making all sorts of graphs. We also talk about how Bethany went from the full Lingthusiasm audio and transcripts to 400 teeny-tiny labelled audio files of Gretchen and Lauren saying particular key words to calculating two important numbers for each vowel that we said and mapping them out on a graph.  

Get a sneak peek of the final vowel plots for Lauren and Gretchen in the shownotes for this episode!

Listen to this episode about creating vowel plots, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #podcast #bonus #bonus episodes #bonuses #bonus 85 #vowel charts #vowel plots #vowels #vowel sounds #Well's lexical set #Bethany Gardner

[tizzypizza]

warmup of my friends’ ocs as fuzzies

#i did these so fucking fast helop #ignore the vowel chart i was literallyg etting up from my seat as i was exporting it #inkling #octoling #fuzzy inkling #fuzzy octoling #fuzzy ooze #splatoon 3 #tiz art

[casismybestfriend]

i did it… i finally finished the english->arabic course

only took me three years give or take 😅

#well. until the next update hopefully #bc imo this course is very limited #it only teaches two tenses and it doesn’t even touch on the dual pronouns or any of that #and it’s quranic/classical so you learn all the short vowels which doesn’t help you learn colloquial arabic #which makes sense as an msa course but still #and all of the helpful grammar charts and vocab lists are hidden or only found on the pc format which is super inconvenient #they also need to make changes on the last few units or so bc those were just dozens of the same few lessons each time #and it was very annoying to not be learning anything new for a large chunk of this course #ever since the last update removing the tree it all got messed up and claimed i made further progress than i actually did #so. next step i should probably get proper grammar books and avtually practice with my colleagues #duolingo #languages #arabic #my posts

[sonechkaandthedynamos]

doing a historical linguistics course is like *insert special character* *insert special character* *insert special character*

#and everything making sense kinda but also feeling lost all the time #and realising that you didn't fully internalise those vowel charts lol

[vikinglanguage]

i know you all know about the kiwi accent, but if you know ipa and are otherwise interested in phonology, i'm begging you to read the wikipedia article

nze is the most valid dialect of english and i will not hear otherwise. they have STRESSED /ə/

#KIWI ENGLISH IS SO FUCKED I LOVE IT #THE VOWEL CHART LOOKS LIKE ABSOLUTELY GARBAGE ITS WONDERFUL #linguistics #phonology #new zealand english #nze #english #pronunciation #fuck i really need to get my tags in order

[fivenightsatcorans]

gently holding the hands of the author of any wikipedia phonology article for a language that uses the latin alphabet: it’s okay, you can use your IPA here. yes i know a lot of the symbols look similar. this is a phonoooollloooogyyyy article, so we have to use standard symbols or people who don’t know the language won’t understand

#if you do not specify what ipa symbol the letter of the alphabet represents i will not understand it #every european language uses the ö symbol to represent a different sound. just because it’s in the article for finnish doesn’t mean i know #where the finnish ö is on a vowel chart in comparison with like. the german ö or something

[rugrats-curious-minds]

The Importance of Teaching Children to Read Through Letters and Sounds

Reading is a fundamental skill that serves as a cornerstone for a child's education and future success. It opens doors to a world of knowledge, imagination, and critical thinking. One of the most effective methods for teaching children to read is through the use of letters and sounds, also known as phonics. In this article, we'll explore the significance of teaching children to read using letters and sounds, highlighting the numerous benefits it offers in their early development.

Building Strong Foundations

Phonics, the method of teaching children to connect letters with their corresponding sounds, helps build strong foundational literacy skills. This approach empowers children to decode words and understand how language works. By mastering the relationship between letters and sounds, children can read unfamiliar words and develop confidence in their reading abilities.

Improved Reading Comprehension

Learning to read through letters and sounds enhances reading comprehension. When children can sound out words, they gain a deeper understanding of the text they are reading. This understanding extends beyond simple word recognition to comprehension, as they can grasp the meaning of the words and the context in which they are used. This comprehension is vital for academic success across all subjects.

Increased Vocabulary

Phonics-based reading instruction contributes significantly to a child's vocabulary development. As children learn to read, they encounter new words regularly. When they can decode these words using phonics skills, they expand their vocabulary effortlessly. A rich vocabulary not only aids in reading but also boosts overall communication skills.

Enhanced Spelling Skills

Teaching children to read through letters and sounds goes hand in hand with improving their spelling abilities. When children understand the relationship between letters and their sounds, they can apply this knowledge to spell words correctly. This skill is invaluable throughout their academic journey and life beyond the classroom.

Encouraging a Love for Reading

Phonics-based reading instruction can help cultivate a lifelong love for reading. When children can read independently and enjoyably, they are more likely to choose books as a source of entertainment and knowledge. This love for reading not only enriches their lives but also supports their ongoing learning and personal development.

Enhanced Confidence

Reading can be a daunting task for children who struggle with it. Phonics instruction provides them with a structured approach that builds confidence. As they successfully decode words and read fluently, they gain a sense of accomplishment that motivates them to continue improving their reading skills.

Individualized Learning

One of the strengths of teaching children to read through letters and sounds is its adaptability to individual learning styles and paces. Each child progresses differently, and phonics instruction can be tailored to their specific needs. This personalized approach ensures that no child is left behind and that struggling readers receive the support they require.

Better Preparedness for Academic Success

The ability to read proficiently is a critical factor in a child's academic success. When children learn to read through letters and sounds, they are better prepared for success in all subject areas. Reading is the gateway to learning, and a strong foundation in reading skills sets the stage for future achievements in school and beyond.

Teaching children to read through letters and sounds, or phonics, is a powerful method that provides them with essential skills for life. It builds strong foundations, enhances comprehension, expands vocabulary, and boosts confidence. Moreover, it instils a lifelong love for reading and prepares children for academic success. As parents and educators, it is crucial to recognize the importance of phonics-based reading instruction and provide children with the tools they need to become confident and proficient readers. In doing so, we empower them to unlock a world of knowledge and imagination through the magic of words.

#learn phonics #phonics sound #phonics #phonics chart #basic phonics #phonics prounciation #study phonics #phonics reading #phonics sheet #Kindergarten Chart #Kindergarten Phonics #alphabetic language #phonics syllables #Pink are vowels #Cream are consonants #Letter cards #Home school #portable set #Fundations letters #Fundations alphabet #Letter names #Letter sounds #ABC cards #Laminated #Cream and ivory #ABC Flashcards

[micallum]

Wait, do people think part of the accent and pronunciation and general language is where you position your voice or am I being an overthinking idiot?

#I tend to throw it back and down for German. raise it high up the nose for French. English is just a little further down than Spanish #Spanish is very neutral as in you carry the voice in the middle - right behind your mouth #this might also have to do with the position of sounds each language has #like the ‘shape’ and openness of vowels and the kind of consonants in the language #look at a phonetic chart and let’s talk ✌️

[probablybadrpgideas]

Replace the alignment chart with the IPA vowel chart. Instead of being "good" or "chaotic," your character is "front" or "low." Good luck figuring out what "mid back" or "high central" means in terms of personality.

#Tick here to allow us to use in the podcast #Generic #Rule Idea #submission

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are'. 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 show notes page.

[Music]

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

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about plotting vowels. But first, we have a fun, new activity that lets you discover what episode of Lingthusiasm you are. Our new quiz will recommend an episode for you based on a series of questions.

Gretchen: This is like a personality quiz. If you’ve always wondered which episode of Lingthusiasm matches your personality the most, or if you are wondering where to start with the back catalogue and aren’t sure which episode to start with, if you’re trying to share Lingthusiasm with a friend or decide which episode to re-listen to, the quiz can help you with this.

Lauren: This quiz is definitely more whimsical than scientific and, unlike our listener survey, is absolutely not intended to be used for research purposes.

Gretchen: Not intended to be used for research purposes. Definitely intended to be used for amusement purposes. Available as a link in the show notes. Please tell us what results you get! We’re very curious to see if there’re some episodes that turn out to be super popular because of this.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was a chat with Dr. Bethany Gardner, who built the vowel plots that we discuss in this episode.

Gretchen: This is a behind-the-scenes episode where we talked with Bethany about how they made the vowel charts that we’ve discussed, how you could make them yourself if you’re interested in it, or if you just wanna follow along in a making-of-process style, you can listen to us talk with them.

Lauren: For that, you can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: As well as so many more bonus episodes that let us help keep making the show for you.

[Music]

Gretchen: Lauren, we’ve talked about vowels before on Lingthusiasm. At the time, we said that your vocal tract is basically like a giant meat clarinet.

Lauren: Yeah, because the reeds are like the vibration of your vocal cords – and then you can manipulate that sound in that clarinets can play different notes and voices can make many different speech sounds. They’re both long and tubular.

Gretchen: We had some people write in that said, “We appreciate the meat clarinet – the cursed meat clarinet – but we think the vocal tract is a little bit more like a meat oboe or a meat bassoon because both of these instruments have two reeds, and we have two vocal cords. So, you want to use something that has a double vocal cord.”

Lauren: I admit I maybe got the oboe and the bassoon confused. I thought that the oboe was a giant instrument. Turns out, the oboe is about the size of a clarinet. Turns out, I don’t know a lot about woodwind instruments.

Gretchen: I think that one of the reasons we did pick a clarinet at the time is because we thought, even if it’s not exactly the same, probably more people have encountered a clarinet and have a vague sense of what it looks like than an oboe, which you didn’t really know what it was. I had to look up how a bassoon works. We thought this metaphor might be a little bit clearer.

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: However.

Lauren: Okay, there’s an update.

Gretchen: I have now been doing some further research on both the vocal tract and musical instruments, and I’m very pleased to report that we, in fact, have an update. Your vocal tract is not just a meat clarinet, not just a meat bassoon, it is, in fact, most similar to a meat bagpipe.

Lauren: Oh, Gretchen, you found something more disgusting. Thank you?

Gretchen: I’m sorry. It’s even worse.

Lauren: Right. I guess the big bag – a bagpipe is made of a bag and pipes – the bag acts like your lungs. The lungs send air up through your vocal folds as they vibrate to make the sound. You do have a bag of air, just like in the human speech apparatus.

Gretchen: That’s a good start. What I didn’t know until I was doing some research about bagpipes – because the lengths that I will go to for this podcast have no bound – is that a bagpipe actually has reeds inside several of the pipes that extrude from the bag.

Lauren: Because there’s multiple sticking out in different spots.

Gretchen: There’s the one that you blow into, which doesn’t have a reed, but then the other ones, there’s the one with the little holes on it that you twiddle your fingers on and make the different notes, and then there’s also some other pipes up at the top. They also have reeds in them. Those reeds are just tuned from the length to a specific level. You know when you hear someone start playing the bagpipes and there’s this drone? [Imitates bagpipe sound] The sort of single note? That’s because of the note those reeds are tuned to in the other pipes that don’t have the holes in them.

Lauren: Ah, they’re not just decorative.

Gretchen: Right. They have this function of giving this harmony to the melody that’s being played on the little pipe with the holes in it, which is technically known as the “chanter,” but this is not a bagpipe podcast despite appearances to the contrary. We will link to some people on YouTube telling you more than you ever wanted to know about how bagpipes work if you want to go down that rabbit hole. But if you had an extra pair of hands or two, or a couple people helping you sort of reaching around your shoulders – this metaphor’s getting weirder by the minute – and you cut a bunch of little holes in the other sticking-up-the-top pipes –

Lauren: You would have less droning, and you could play multiple melodies or multiple notes at the same time. Hm.

Gretchen: At the same time. With this, you could make a bagpipe play something very close to vowels.

Lauren: Ah, cool!

Gretchen: This is so cursed.

Lauren: I mean, yes. Before we even talk about making it out of meat – it’s deeply, deeply cursed – it kind of reminds me of this instrument from the early 20th Century called the “voder.”

Gretchen: Would I pronounce that “vo-DUH” or “vo-DER”?

Lauren: With the R at the end.

Gretchen: Okay, “voder.”

Lauren: Thank you, convenient rhotic speaker here.

Gretchen: I’m glad to be of service.

Lauren: It kind of looked like something between a little stenographer’s keyboard and a piano, and with a whole bunch of finger keys and foot pedals you could manipulate it to make something that sounds like human speech.

Gretchen: Ah, wow. And this is pretty old?

Lauren: It’s from like the 1930s. There’s a little, short video snippet in one of the links in the show notes.

Gretchen: You could play these chords, and also have some consonants somehow, and end up with something that sounds like a synthetic human voice.

Lauren: Yeah. A lot of the early computer speech synthesis, as well, was actually quite good at making things that sounded like vowels. It turns out a lot of the consonant things are a little bit harder to do, but the very basic sound of vowels, as you say, you could play it with just a few bagpipes very carefully re-engineered.

Gretchen: I guess if you’re looking at instruments that can play multiple notes at the same time, we could also say that the human is like a meat piano.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: Or at least you could make vowels on a piano by doing a sufficiently complicated sequence of weird chords, like notes at the same time.

Lauren: I mean, we also have an instrument that’s known as the human voice. Humans are very good at singing. We possibly don’t have to engineer all these cursed things to get to that.

Gretchen: Okay. Let’s talk about the human voice as itself. We start with the vocal cords or folds. The tenseness or looseness of the vocal folds is what produces pitch. Then they go through the throat, which we can think of as one tube. Then they go through the mouth cavity, which we can think of as a second tube. Each of these tubes bounces around the sound in different ways to add two additional notes – one from the throat, one from the mouth – onto the sound that’s coming out, which is what makes it sound like a vowel to us.

Lauren: You can map the physics of air moving through the throat space and the mouth space as it comes out to pay attention to the differences between different sounds.

Gretchen: If you’re taking a physics diagram or a diagram of the acoustic signal and saying, “Which pitches are coming out of the mouth, which frequencies are coming out of the mouth that are being produced by these two chambers?” then you can see what those are, and you can do stuff with those diagrams once you’ve made them.

Lauren: The seeing bit is spectrograms, which we looked at in an earlier episode and played around with making different sounds and how they look in this way of visualising it where you have all these bands of strength and information that you can see vary depending on the different sounds that you made. That’s because of those different ways that we manipulate and play around with the air as its coming out of our mouth.

Gretchen: The first band that comes out is just the pitch of the voice itself. The lowest one is what we hear as the pitch of the sound, but I can make /aaaa/ and I can make /iiii/. Those are the same set of pitches but on different vowels.

Lauren: There’s something more than pitch happening there.

Gretchen: There’s something more than pitch happening. There’s two more notes – sounds – that come out at the same time. If the throat chamber is large because the tongue is fairly high and far forward, then this sound that’s the next one after the pitch, which was call “F1,” is low. Then if the mouth is quite open, and the lips are spread, the mouth chamber is quite small, so that sound is quite high, so the next sound, “F2,” is high pitched. If you put your tongue far forward, and your lips spread, you get /i/. The first of these dark bands is low; the second of them is high. That produces the sound that we hear as /i/. Whereas, by comparison, if we make the sound /u/, the throat chamber is still large because the tongue is quite high, but now, the mouth chamber is big because we have the lips rounding that make it big – /u/. Now, F1 is low, and F2 is also low, and we’re hearing the sound /u/.

Lauren: We have a very clear way of telling from those signals in the spectrogram, if we look at it, the difference between an /i/ and an /u/, even if we can’t hear it, we can see it on the spectrogram. This is where you begin to read spectrograms.

Gretchen: Or if we want to start measuring spectrograms very precisely, we can start doing this. We can also start seeing, okay, is /i/ when I make it the same as the /i/ when you make it?

Lauren: They’re similar enough that we recognise it as the same sound. If we both say, “fleece.”

Gretchen: “Fleece.”

Lauren: You say, /flis/. I say, /flis/.

Gretchen: /pətɛɪtoʊ pətatoʊ/. I think they sound pretty similar.

Lauren: Mine is maybe a little bit higher. I really pushed my tongue forward and up. It’s a very Australian thing to do.

Gretchen: We can actually record some people making all of the vowels and compare their measurements for these two different bands of frequency and see how similar two people’s vowels are to each other.

Lauren: Depending on the quality of your recording, you can see a lot more happening there as well. There’re all the properties that mean that we can tell your voice from my voice, or my voice from someone who has exactly the same accent because we have all these other features. It’s very different to if you record, say, a whistle or one of those tuning forks that people use to tune instruments because they are giving a clean single note.

Gretchen: A pure tone that’s just one frequency, one pitch, not several pitches all at the same time that we then have to smoosh together and interpret as a vowel sound.

Lauren: That’s what gives the human voice its richness. If a human voice sings the same note as a clarinet and an oboe, which are definitely two completely different woodwind instruments, there’s all these extra bits and things in the spectrogram that you can pick up the difference in the quality or just use your ears – also another possibility.

Gretchen: Yeah. If you wanna do detailed acoustic analysis on it – which is kind of fun and can tell us more precise things about the differences between how different people speak, which is neat – then you have this very precise way of measuring it by converting it into a visual graph/chart thing or a vowel plot rather than just listening to someone and being like, “Uh, these sound pretty similar. I dunno. I guess they’re a bit different. How are they different? Hmm.” Sometimes, being able to do it with numbers is easier.

Lauren: In the era before we had computers to create spectrograms and take these measurements, people did use their ear. The best phoneticians had this amazing ability to tell the difference between really, really subtly-similar-but-slightly-different sounds.

Gretchen: And they’re so well trained in being able to hear the difference between “Oh, you’re saying this, and your tongue is a little bit further forward than this other person who’s saying this with their tongue a little bit further back,” but if you’re not very good at hearing tongue position out of sounds, you can also produce some stuff and make the machines tell you some numbers about it, which can be easier with a different type of training.

Lauren: When we talk about the position of the tongue and how open the mouth is, we can use a plot to map where in the mouth these things are happening. That’s called the “vowel space.” We made a lot of silly sounds when we talked about that many episodes ago.

Gretchen: The vowel space goes from /i-ɛ-a/ on one side.

Lauren: That’s all up the front of your mouth, and it’s just going from being more close to more open.

Gretchen: /i/ to /ɛ/ to /a/, but you can through all these subtle gradations between them, and through /u-ɔ-ɑ/ at the back.

Lauren: That’s from all the way up the top at the back to open at the back.

Gretchen: You can draw a diagram of this which is shaped like square that’s been a bit skewed. It’s wider at the top than at the bottom. It’s known as the “vowel trapezoid” because the mouth is not perfectly shaped like a square. The jaw can hinge open.

Lauren: Only so far.

Gretchen: Only so far.

Lauren: Because this represents how you say or articulate these sounds, this is known as “articulatory phonetics.”

Gretchen: But then because you’re articulating a thing that goes into a sound that we can also analyse as the sound itself, these ways that you can articulate things map onto things that show up in the sound itself. Analysing that is called “acoustic phonetics.”

Lauren: Because you’re paying attention to the acoustic properties – the sound properties.

Gretchen: The really nifty thing is that this vowel chart that we’ve made from over 100 years ago, linguists, before they had computers, were like, “Here’s what I think the articulatory properties of the vowels are based on my mouth and my ear and some other people’s mouths and ears.” You can actually map very precisely this acoustic thing. Once we had computers, you can make them correspond to each other in this way that – you hope it works because, obviously, people do understand the vowels, but it actually does work when you start measuring things as well.

Lauren: I had always wondered whether it was just a coincidence that the articulation – where you put your mouth – and the acoustic information about the F1 and F2 with the spectrogram, but explaining it in terms of F1 and F2 are the way you change the shape of your throat and your mouth that leads to these changes in the acoustic signal, you can see how the articulation and the acoustics come together, and you get a similar type of information across both of them.

Gretchen: Absolutely. I think it’s really neat that there’s this relatively straightforward correspondence. There’s also, you know, an F3 that also does other stuff because there’s other more squishy bits of your mouth, and we’re not getting into them.

Lauren: There’s also a bunch of flip-flopping of X- and Y-axes that you need to do that Bethany kindly walked us through in the bonus episode.

Gretchen: Because these diagrams were created in an era before they were doing the computer acoustics. Sometimes, I think about the alternate version of what phonetics would look like if we’d started doing it with computers right away, and how there’s all this analogue stuff that’s residual based on human impressions, and how our vowel charts might be completely rotated if we had just started doing it with computers the whole time.

Lauren: But then we’d have to imagine ourselves standing on our heads to say anything, so I’m glad they are the way they are.

Gretchen: That’s true. When you’re talking about vowels, it’s an interesting challenge with English because there’s lots of different dialects of English, varieties of English, ways of speaking English, and, generally speaking, we’re pretty good at understanding other accents. One of the big factors that accents vary on, though, is the vowels.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: If you’re getting people to record a word list to do some vowel analysis on, what you might wanna do is have them record a bunch of words that all begin and end with the same consonant insofar as possible.

Lauren: Because vowels are very sweet and easily influenced. They’re very easily influenced by the consonants that are next to them. You have to make sure that they’re all kept in line and not influenced by what’s happening around them by giving them all the same context.

Gretchen: They’re very susceptible to peer pressure. You can have people say something like, “beat,” “bet,” “bit,” “bought,” “boot,” all of this stuff between B and T.

Lauren: I learnt to record between H and D: “hid,” “had,” “hoo’d,” “hawed.” Some of those words are less, uh, common – frequent – than others, but again, a really consistent environment.

Gretchen: But this also, obviously, causes problems for when you want to talk about the particular vowels in a given accent or in a given variety because if you go around saying, “Oh, well, the /hoɪd/ vowel” or something like this, how do you know if that’s a Cockney person saying, “hide,” or it’s me saying “hoyed,” or something else because all your consonants are the exact same, and there’s nothing to let you figure out what the original word is.

Lauren: Someone did come up with a solution for this. That person’s name is John Wells.

Gretchen: John Wells is this British phonetician who I’ve never actually met in person, but I feel like I know him because I used to read his blog back when he posted more actively.

Lauren: He used to write his blog in the International Phonetic Alphabet, which means that if you read the IPA, you would be reading it in John Wells’s voice.

Gretchen: You absolutely would be. This was a challenge that I used to set to myself. Sometimes, he also wrote in Standard English orthography, to be fair, but sometimes he would just write a whole blog post in IPA, and you’d be like, “Cool, I guess I’m reading this out loud to myself and hearing John Wells’s accent and speaking it like him,” which was really neat. In the 1980s, John Wells was like, “Hey, it’d be really useful if we had a way to refer to sound changes that happen in different English varieties,” which often happen to – like, all of the times you say the /ɪ/ vowel are a little bit more like this or like that, depending on the accent.

Lauren: I think it was very personally motivated because he was writing a book called “Accents in English.” It gets very difficult in a book, especially, but even in an audio recording, to be like, “the /ɪ/ vowel,” “the /u/ vowel.”

Gretchen: Right. You could use the International Phonetic Alphabet to refer to the specific vowel that people are making. But if you want to say, “People in this area realise this vowel as that, and people in this other area realise the same vowel as something else,” how do you refer to that thing that’s the macro-category of vowel that people would consider themselves to be saying the same word, but the specific way they’re realising it is different? He came up with what he called “the standard lexical sets,” which are now also called, “Wells Lexical Sets,” possibly John Wells’s greatest legacy, which is a bunch of words that are, crucially, easy to distinguish from each other based on the surrounding consonants that you can say when you’re giving a talk – like you can say, “the ‘kit’ vowel,” or “the ‘goose’ vowel,” or “the ‘fleece’ vowel,” and people know that the “kit” vowel refers to the specific sound because there’s no other “keet” word in English that it could be confused with.

Lauren: John Wells was somewhat self-deprecating when he was talking about this, and he was like, “I just kind of came up with it in a week where I had to write this bit of the book, and it’s weird to think that they’re still in use now,” but it was based on years of insight into the different ways different varieties of English realise different vowels and the balance he was trying to strike.

Gretchen: He has this charming blog post from 2010 where he’s like, “Anybody’s welcome to use them. I don’t claim any copyright. Maybe this is my legacy now, I guess.” He does actually put quite a bit of thought into the sets because they’re words that can’t be easily confused for each other. Sometimes, that means the words are a little bit rare. You have “fleece.” You might think, “Well, why not use ‘sheep’ because surely that’s more common. People say that.”

Lauren: But “ship” and “sheep” are very hard to distinguish in some varieties of English.

Gretchen: Right. If you had “sheep,” it could be confused with “ship,” whereas if you have “fleece” and “kit,” there’s no “flice” or “keet” for them to be confused with.

Lauren: Good nonce words to add to your collection.

Gretchen: Thank you. Similarly, for people like me where I make the vowels in “caught,” as in the past tense of “catch,” and “cot,” as in a small bed, the same. If I talk about /cɑt/ and /cɑt/, people are like, “I dunno which one you’re talking about because you say them both the same.” And I’m like, “Great, neither do I.”

Lauren: You mean when you’re talking about /cɑt/ and /cɔt/.

Gretchen: Hmm. Yes, see, you don’t have that “caught/cot merger.”

Lauren: Very easy for me, but it’s much easier to be able to say /θɔt/ and /lɑt/ – much more distinct for me to perceive with you because they don’t have merged equivalents.

Gretchen: “Thought” and “lot” are much more distinct because the consonants are different. You don’t need to be relying only on the vowels. Some of these words are just super fun. Can we read the whole Wells Lexical Sets? There’re not very many of them.

Lauren: Sure. Let’s take turns in going through each of the words.

Gretchen: All right.

Lauren: So, you can hear the differences in the way we pronounce each of these vowels.

Gretchen: /kit/.

Lauren: /kit/.

Gretchen: / dɹɛs/.

Lauren: / dɹɛs/.

Gretchen: / tɹæp/.

Lauren: /tɹæp/.

Gretchen: /lɑt/.

Lauren: /lɑt/.

Gretchen: /stɹʌt/.

Lauren: /stɹʌt/.

Gretchen: /fʊt/.

Lauren: /fʊt/.

Gretchen: /bæθ/.

Lauren: /bɑθ/.

Gretchen: Ooo, very different.

Lauren: We’ll come back to that one.

Gretchen: /klɑθ/.

Lauren: /klɑθ/.

Gretchen: /nɛɹs/.

Lauren: My Australian English speaker in me is already immediately prepared for /nɛːs/.

Gretchen: So, non-rhotic. Very good.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: /flis/.

Lauren: /flis/.

Gretchen: /fɛɪs/.

Lauren: /fɛɪs/.

Gretchen: /pɑm/.

Lauren: /pæm/.

Gretchen: Ooo, very different. /θɑt/.

Lauren: /θɔt/.

Gretchen: Also, very different. We’ll come back to this. /goʊt/.

Lauren: /gəut/.

Gretchen: Bit different. /gus/.

Lauren: /gus/.

Gretchen: /pɹəɪs/.

Lauren: /pɹæɪs/.

Gretchen: Bit different. I have Canadian raising there. We’ll get back to that. /t͡ʃoɪs/.

Lauren: /t͡ʃoɪs/.

Gretchen: /moʊθ/.

Lauren: /mæʊθ/.

Gretchen: Also, we’ll get back to that. /niɹ/.

Lauren: /nɪɑ/.

Gretchen: /skwɛɹ/.

Lauren: /skwɛɑ/.

Gretchen: /stɑɹt/.

Lauren: /stɑːt/.

Gretchen: /nɔɹθ/.

Lauren: /nɔːθ/.

Gretchen: /fɔɹs/.

Lauren: /fɔːs/.

Gretchen: /kjʊɹ/.

Lauren: /kjʊɑ/. I’m only slightly hamming up my Australian English diphthongs there.

Gretchen: That whole set with the Rs where I’m like, “These are just the same sounds, but now there’s an R,” you’re like, “No, these are really different diphthongs.”

Lauren: /kjʊɑ/.

Gretchen: /kjʊɑ/. /kjʊɹ/.

Lauren: Taking you on a journey of my whole mouth.

Gretchen: One thing you could do if you’re trying to compare mine and Lauren’s vowels is you could listen to us saying them and being like, “Yeah, those sound kind of different in some places.” But another thing we could do, is we could draw some diagrams.

Lauren: That’s what we did.

Gretchen: Yes!

Lauren: We were very grateful that Dr. Bethany Gardner – who is a recent PhD in psychology and language processing at Vanderbilt University in Nashville in the USA – took the time to work with us to take recordings of us saying words and plotting the vowels onto a vowel plot.

Gretchen: Now, we can look at our vowel plots and compare our vowels to each other. We have a whole bonus episode with Bethany about how we made these graphs with them. For the moment, let’s just look at them and compare them with each other and say some things about the results.

Lauren: We sent Bethany recordings of us reading the Wells Lexical Sets, much the way we did just then.

Gretchen: Less giggling though.

Lauren: We did record them a little bit more professionally, but they also used some processes to scrape data of equivalent word recordings from episodes of Lingthusiasm using our transcripts – turns out, another use of our transcripts!

Gretchen: Get people to analyse your vowels for you. It’s so cool!

Lauren: You can see the difference between clearly spoken vowels where we’re really focusing on them and then that really compelling influence that other sounds have on vowels that drag them all over the space.

Gretchen: Yeah. I’m looking at the first set of graphs for each of us, which are the Wells Lexical Sets, and my vowels are a lot more consistent in them. When I make /i/ and /ɪ/ and /u/, all the points are quite clustered in one spot – because we said everything several times – but I seem to be hitting quite a consistent target there. Whereas when I look at Bethany’s vowel plot of me from the Lingthusiasm episodes, there’s way more stuff there, and I’m way more spread out. My vowels are less consistent with each other because I’m producing them in several words. They tested several different words. I’m just producing them in running speech where things merge into each other a lot more rather than this very clear word list style.

Lauren: And human ears and brains are so good at disambiguating things that might be very close to each other in the plot, but in a running sentence, we can hear them quite clearly for the words that they are.

Gretchen: Right. My “goose” vowel and my “foot” vowel – /gus/ and /fʊt/ – are almost totally distinct from each other when I’m reading a word list. There’s very little overlap in terms of how I’m saying them. But when I’m saying them in running speech, apparently there’s a lot of overlap because I’m probably saying something like, “Oh, go get the goose,” /gʊs/, rather than /gus/ with that really clear /u/.

Lauren: There’s no other word I’m gonna confuse “goose” with, or even if I did, in context, I’d know what thing you’re expecting me to go get.

Gretchen: Right. Even if I’m saying something like, “dude,” you’re not gonna confuse that for “dud.” I’d be saying them in different contexts.

Lauren: The nice thing is you can see, especially from our clearly spoken word lists, that we are speaking a language where the vowels are in a similar place, but there are some slight differences. You can actually start to get the hang of the differences in the way different varieties of English tend to use the vowel space from this information.

Gretchen: One of the things I noticed about your vowel plot, Lauren – and this is a feature of Australian English – is that your “kit” vowel and your “fleece” vowel are very close to each other, especially in episode speech rather than word list speech.

Lauren: Yeah, “kit” and “fleece,” for me, are both really far forward. You’re using other features like length or tenseness to really disambiguate them. People struggle to do it.

Gretchen: Or just in context. I noticed when I was visiting Australia that people would say things like /bɪːg/, and I’d be like, “Oh, okay, I would say that as /bɪg/.”

Lauren: It’s a pretty classic feature of Australian English. It does remind me of one of the most embarrassing times someone misheard me when I was living in the UK. I was talking about how I used to be on a team with my friends for social netball. This person was not listening that well, and it was a noisy environment, and they thought that I had said, “nipple.”

Gretchen: Oh, no!

Lauren: /nɪpl̩/ and /nɛtbɑl/.

Gretchen: /nɛtbɑl/, /nɛtbɑl/, whereas I think my /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ vowels, my “kit” and “dress” vowels, are pretty distinct from each other. They don’t really overlap.

Lauren: Whereas all of Australian English is really far forward. It tends to be quite high. The British English speaker – I don’t know what sport they thought we play in Australia, but there was a moment of deep confusion.

Gretchen: These are the types of things that you can find out when you get your vowels done the way sometimes people – I think there’s a trend on Instagram right now to get your colours done, you know, find out whether you’re a “winter” or a “soft spring” or something like this.

Lauren: I’m an Australian English “kit”-fronting.

Gretchen: Yeah. What are your vowels? What does this say about where you’re from? Is there anything you noticed about mine?

Lauren: I think, for you, definitely what becomes clear is that “caught/cot merger,” or, as I like to think about it, the “Gawne/gone merger.”

Gretchen: Ah, the “Gawne/gone merger.”

Lauren: I can tell if people have it if my name and the word “gone” sound the same.

Gretchen: The past participle of “go.”

Lauren: It’s very salient for me. The cot/caught merger is so famous, people don’t use the Wells Set terms for it. They just refer to it as “caught/cot.”

Gretchen: But you could also call it the “thought/lot merger” or the “lot/thought merger.” I never know which one goes first because I literally just think of these as being said the same.

Lauren: You can see evidence. We’re not imagining that you’re merging them. You are physically merging them in the vowel space.

Gretchen: I’m literally saying them as the same thing. I was always confused about the “thought” vowel when I was learning the International Phonetic Alphabet because I was like, “I can’t figure out how to make a sound that is somewhere in between this sound in ‘lot’ and ‘thought’ but doesn’t go all the way up to the /oʊ/ in ‘goat’.” It doesn’t feel like there’s anything between them for me. That’s true. The vast majority of Canadians have “thought” and “lot” merged. But unlike at least some Americans, we don’t have them merged low; we have them merged high. I have “thought” and “caught,” and in order to produce the other vowel, I had to actually produce something lower in my throat – like /θɑt/ /cat/ which sounds very American to me – I had to produce this lower sound because there was no space between “thought” and “goat.” They’re very close to each other. In fact, the thing that I wasn’t producing was /ɑ/, the really low one, that sort of dentist sound.

Lauren: Yeah. Movements and mergers can happen in all kinds of different directions. The merging of “cot” and “caught” also explains why it took me a very long time to understand that “podcast” is a pun because it’s meant to be a pun with “broadcast,” and /pɑd/ and /bɹɔːd/.

Gretchen: /pɑdkæst/ and /bɹɑdkæst/. It’s the same vowel for me.

Lauren: Whereas it works as a pun for you. That was very satisfying to learn that’s why that’s meant to be a pun.

Gretchen: The pun that I didn’t get based on my accent – and this is to do with the “price” and “mouth” vowels – I didn’t realise that “I scream for ice cream” was supposed to be a pun.

Lauren: Oh, because the raising that you have in Canada means that it doesn’t work that way, whereas /ɑɪ skɹim fə ɑɪ skɹim/.

Gretchen: Right, you have the same vowel in those – or the same diphthong – but for me, “I scream for ice cream,” those are very different. In “choice” and “price,” I have different vowels than I would have in “choys” and “prize” – if “choys” was a word.

Lauren: “Bok choys” – multiple.

Gretchen: “Bok choys” – yeah, several of them. And “prize.”

Lauren: Returning to “podcast” but moving to the other end of the word, /kɑst // kæst/ as a distinction is so famous in mapping varieties of British English that people talk about /bɑθ // tɹæp/ distinctions all the time.

Gretchen: I hear of it as called the “bath/trap split,” but as you can hear, the “/bæθ // tɹæp/ split,” I just say them both the same.

Lauren: Whereas in Australia, Victorians traditionally would say /kæsl̩/ like “trap,” and people further north and in the rest of the country could say, /kɑsl̩/ –

Gretchen: Like “bath.”

Lauren: So, whether you’re a /kɑsl̩/ or a /kæsl̩/ shows this “bath/trap split” as well, to the point where, in New South Wales, you get the city of “New /kɑsl̩/,” but in Victoria, you have the town of “/kæsl̩/ Main.”

Gretchen: Ooo, this “castle” distinction from the “trap/bath split” – I think sometimes when I’m trying to do a fake British accent, I will just make all of my “traps” and “baths” into /tɹɑps/ and /bɑθs/.

Lauren: Right, okay. You know there’s something happening there, and you haven’t quite landed – because it does vary.

Gretchen: Well, then they’re not different categories for me because it’s all one category, and I push them all forward rather than moving half of them because I don’t know which half to move.

Lauren: I find it very satisfying listening to “No Such Thing as a Fish,” because they talk about the /pɑdkɑst/ or the /pɑdkæst/, and their guests do, depending on whether they’re from Southern England or more in the midlands and north where they tend to say /kæst/ instead of /kɑst/.

Gretchen: I have literally never noticed this distinction. I’ve also listened to many episodes of “No Such Thing as a Fish” because you made me start listening to them back in the day, and I’ve never noticed that they say anything different because it’s just not something I pay attention to.

Lauren: It’s so salient for me as a Victorian English speaker, but I notice it all the time. There would be a really fun mapping variation activity to do listening through to Fish – turns out I just listen to it and don’t get distracted by that too much.

Gretchen: Well, if you want to commission Bethany to make graphs of their vowels, I’m sure that’s an option.

Lauren: I love how Wells’ lexical set has just entered – in many ways, the “bath/trap split,” it means you get all these other terms like “goose fronting,” which is just great as a term.

Gretchen: I love how vivid these words are. Things like “fleece” and “goose” and “goat,” they’re very common animal nouns that are quite vivid.

Lauren: And there’re definitely linguists who have dressed up as Wells Lexical Set items for Halloween. It makes a great group Halloween costume.

Gretchen: Oh my gosh, my favourite one of these was from North Carolina State University. They got the whole department, and they each dressed up as one member of the Wells Lexical Set. Someone was a “kit.” They dressed like a cat. Someone dressed like a goose, and someone dressed like a cloth or a fleece. Then they stood in the positions to create the vowel diagram. They posted a photo on the internet. You can see it. We will link to it. It’s really great.

Lauren: Magic. You and I also once had a project where we plotted the Wells Lexical Set using emoji.

Gretchen: That was your project.

Lauren: I did the making the joke. You did the graphic design. It was a good team project.

Gretchen: Okay, that’s fair. That’s fair. I feel like I remember you being the instigator of this.

Lauren: Shenanigans were shenaniganed.

Gretchen: You can get a goose emoji and a goat emoji, and you can map the vowels in there as well.

Lauren: And “Goose fronting” – because we’re talking about moving the tongue further forward or back or up and down in the vowel space – I have quite fronted vowels as an Australian English speaker for my front vowels. So, “goose” – I’ve already got it quite far forward compared to you. You can see that in the diagrams.

Gretchen: I think my “goose” – my goose is also cooked – my “goose” is also fronted. Because I think Canadian English is also undergoing goose fronting. There’s a lot of different regions that are all simultaneously fronting their geese – no, not their “geese,” fronting their “gooses.”

Lauren: Fronting their “gooses.” I feel like the really stereotypical example is from California, particularly in the lexical item “dude.”

Gretchen: “Dude” – sort of like a surfer pronunciation of “duuude.”

Lauren: “/du̟d/ you’re a fronted /gu̟s/.”

Gretchen: If you compare that with like /dud/, which would be less fronted, /dud/ sounds like you’re more of a fuddy duddy, and /du̟d/ sounds like you’re “so /ku̟l/.”

Lauren: Yeah, I mean, there’re other things happening there as well because I found a paper while researching this where someone looked at 70 years of Received Pronunciation, which is that incredibly stuffy, British, old-fashioned newsreader voice. Apparently, goose fronting is happening in that variety as well.

Gretchen: Oh, so if the Queen was still alive, she’d be fronting her “goose” as well?

Lauren: Quite possibly. Gooses are being fronted all over the place.

Gretchen: All over the English-speaking world. One of the things that can happen if you’re getting your vowel tea leaves read is you can say things about region. Another thing that looking at a vowel plot can do – because vowels just contribute so much to our sense of accent – is it can say things about gender. One of the cool studies that I came across about this is there’re studies of kids. People often assess someone’s gender based on their voice. If someone’s on the phone, you may have an idea about their gender. You may also have an idea of their age. Part of this is based on vocal tract size. Kids’ voices are high pitched because kids’ heads and throats and larynxes are smaller than adults.

Lauren: The cool thing is there’s no gender difference in that until puberty. People who go through a testosterone-heavy puberty tend to grow larger vocal tracts and tend to have deeper pitches. I mean, not in the scheme of things where they’re so completely different. There’s so much overlap. But we’re really tuned into these subtle differences. But before that age, anything that kids are doing different, it’s nothing to do with what’s happening with the meat pipe and everything to do with what’s happening with the social performance of gender, which is to do with your culture.

Gretchen: Even at age 4, when there’s really no physiological difference, age 8 when there’s really no physiological difference, you can see that kids are producing their vowels somewhat differently in a difference that increases with age based on their gender because they’re culturally acquiring “This is what it means to feel like a boy,” “This is what it means to feel like a girl,” and they’re doing gender with their voices even when they don’t have the vocal tract changes reinforcing that yet.

Lauren: Cool.

Gretchen: Yeah. You can see that there are differences at age 4 that increase with age and increase up to age 8 and 12 and 16 and get more distinct from each other. The other thing is, once people get a bit older in teenage-hood and in adulthood, there are gender differences in vocal tract. The general finding with gender differences in vowel plot size – so we’ve been talking about having some vowels be more front or some vowels be more similar to each other, but the overall finding when it comes to gender is roughly that, at least in English-speaking environments, men tend to have all of their vowels more similar to each other, more towards the centre of the space/ Specifically, cis straight men tend to have vowels that are all more towards the centre of the vowel space. Everybody else – so cis, straight women, gay men, lesbians, trans people of all genders, nonbinary people – use way more of the vowel space.

Lauren: Straight men, you’re missing out.

Gretchen: Like, cis straight men are doing this one very specific thing with buying into hegemonic masculinity of vowels where they’re not wearing interesting colours, and they’re not doing interesting vowels.

Lauren: Hmm.

Gretchen: There was one quote from one of the studies that I read where they had one cis straight man who was an anomaly in the list of not doing this very centralised vowel thing, and he was like, “Yeah, sometimes people hear me, and they think I’m gay, which I’m not. I’m just a nerd. I don’t really do that macho stuff.”

Lauren: Aww, it’s nice they asked him.

Gretchen: Yeah. “People just perceive my vowels as whatever. I don’t really care. I’m not trying to do that thing with my vowels.”

Lauren: Fascinating that the social discourse was enough that he had been made aware of it.

Gretchen: Yeah, and that doing anything out of that little man box of the very small set of vowels was enough to get him thinking, “Oh, yeah, well, it’s because I don’t buy into this particularly narrow view of masculinity.”

Lauren: Fascinating. I should say, you flagged English there, but that’s because we have more of this work in English. We need more of this work across the world’s languages. There’s so much to be done about the social dimensions of vowels.

Gretchen: Right. A lot of the early work in, especially, gender and vowels has this very essentialist framework of like, “We found the male vocal tract; we found the female vocal tract.” There’s a recent study by Santiago Barreda and Michael Stuart which I got to see at the Linguistic Society of America last year where they were looking at “What are the vowel differences between genders, and can we actually characterise these more precisely?” They found that the biggest thing that affected vowel spaces was actually related to height. Taller people have more space in their vowels – deeper voices.

Lauren: Makes sense. They’ve got more space for their bigger meat pipe. That’s more of a bassoon than an oboe, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Taller people have a bigger meat pipe. In fact, the relationship between height of your whole body and size of your meat pipe is very linear and doesn’t have a categorical distinction for gender. Of course, if you collapse this into two different buckets labelled “men” and “women,” you’ll find, on average, that men are taller than women on average, but of course, there’re lots of individual people who are exceptions to that, and it’s much more of a variant thing. Similarly, with some of the research on sexuality, some of the early stuff is like, “Oh, do gay men or do lesbians have different-shaped vowel tracts from a physiological perspective?” The answer is “No, this is cultural.”

Lauren: Right, yeah.

Gretchen: But the finding keeps being reported in terms of like, “Oh, well, gay men have more extreme vowels in various places,” especially with “trap” being produced further away from the centre of the mouth. Lesbian women tend to have further-back sounds for “palm” and for “goose,” or sometimes they’re intermediate between male and female targets. But again, this seems to very much be cultural. The bi women – some studies found they patterned with the lesbian women. Some studies found they pattern with the straight women. No one knows what to do with us. The one study I found on bi men found they patterned with the gay men, but again, maybe other studies would find something different. There’s a paper by Lal Zimman about trans men’s voices being perceived as quote-unquote “gay” after they go on testosterone. He finds that it’s not quite the exact same as the cis gay men, but it’s also because it seems to not be in that narrow man box. People are just parsing it as gay.

Lauren: So many cultural attitudes coming to bear on vowel spaces.

Gretchen: Studies on trans women’s vowel spaces is often fairly dominated by the speech pathology literature, which is about, specifically, vocal training and trans women really trying to make their voices sound different, but it still finds that they’re not doing exactly the same thing as either cis women or cis men.

Lauren: Right. Again, lots of cultural practice at play there. Anything about our nonbinary pals?

Gretchen: There is a recent dissertation by Jacq Jones, and they find that basically nonbinary people do whatever the heck they like.

Lauren: I love it.

Gretchen: Which is, again, not exactly the same as anybody else and not necessarily the same as each other either. They could just keep doing whatever they want. But yeah, there’s a lot of stuff on gender and sexuality, especially in terms of dispersion of the vowel space and regional stuff in terms of specific things being closer or further from each other.

Lauren: There’s so much happening in vowels in terms of plotting them all in this space in the mouth, but also so much happening in terms of plotting them in the social space. This is what makes vowels so rich and so interesting.

Gretchen: I feel like when we’re talking about vowel plotting, there’s this aspect of “Mwahaha, I am putting my fingers together and plotting,” which is maybe the fact that vowels do convey so much social information about who you are or where you’re from that you can make plots about people when you know what their vowels are. If we were going to make a meat clarinet or a meat bassoon or even a meat bagpipe –

Lauren: Oh, dear.

Gretchen: I’m so sorry. We would not only want it to be able to convey the basic vowel chart. One of the reasons why I think these synthetic versions of the human voice often sound so weird is that they don’t have all of this additional demographic information, regional information, gender and sexuality information that’s also so important to our experience of vowels.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode – including visualisations of our very own vowel plots – go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including the IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts and aesthetic IPA posters – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: My social media and blog is Superlinguo. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Our most recent bonus topic was a chat with Dr. Bethany Gardner, who built the vowel plots we discussed in this episode. We talked to Bethany about how to do vowel charts and how you can plot your own vowels, or you can just learn about how they did it for us. Think of it like a little behind-the-scenes episode on the making of this episode. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #podcast #transcripts #podcasts #episodes #episode 90 #vowels #vowel sounds #vowel plots #vowel charts #IPA #international phonetic alphabet #phonetics #accents

[evasthesis]

ok ok i gotta share this with yall, not sure if this is common knowledge among ling nerds but if not the best site on the internet is ipa.typeit.org/full

it has almost every ipa symbol you could ever need, quick-access vowel, consonant, and diacritic charts for reference, shortcuts for everything that are easily learnable, and on windows, you can get the app to make the shortcuts work everywhere (the site works just fine too tho)

hella cool, go check it out, i promise i'm not sponsored or anything it's just been a lifesaver for me as someone who consistently has to type in ipa

#linguistics #evasthesis #conlang

[bivht]

Moon Sign in the Persona Charts Observations

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Idk why but I’m obsessed with looking at moon signs. The moon sign traits are always the most noticeable to me

🎒People that have that look-at-me factor may have Leo moon in the moon pc or venus pc. If in Moon pc, they can attract attention just by breathing. With Venus pc it’s more like they have to be interacting, talking with another person for people to notice them. Because Venus is about relations. Both stand out in center positions.

🎒If someone’s moon sign is the same as your mercury sign in the moon/mercury/venus/mars pc, they understand each other quite well. The moon will appreciate the mercury’s way of expressing themselves and the mercury finds the moon familial and is comfortable around them. I have a lot of friends with this compatibility.

🎒If two people have the same moon sign in the mercury pc, they seem like a couple sorry. Their way of thinking is so similar. These are the people that can look at each other and know what the other one is thinking without saying anything. Their bond transcends the limitations of speech.

🎒Virgo moon in the mercury pc have to be the most respectful, grateful, polite people I’ve ever met. They’re good at handling and navigating through situations in a professional environment because they’re unbiased and “right place right time” appropriate sort of people. They have strong boundaries with their personal details and with physical contact and can be slow to trust people. They have a sort of perfect look to them. Not necessarily their appearance but more like their self expression. I notice a lot of them tend to be on the slimmer side. They tend to eat until comfortably full rather than stuffed. They don’t bite more than they can chew and don’t make promises they can’t keep. 10/10 respectable people.

🎒Trust an earth moon in the mercury pc/moon pc to give an honest review. They avoid using emotive words like “best” and “most” and instead take time to analyze the pros and cons whilst being respectful. They’re not gullible, not dramatic but realistic and true skeptics.

🎒Aries moon in the mercury pc/mars pc are so hot!!

🎒Not an astrology observation but people who lack these letters in their name—-> b,k,t,e,n,w,h,q,z are terrible at math for some reason. Or just very slow to learn math concepts. Even if you have one of these letters in your name, it has to be prominent, meaning: first letter, second letter, first vowel, last letter. This is more of an assumption so please let me know if it resonates.

🎒People with an abundance of air moons in the moon/mercury/venus/mars pc stare at people a LOT

🎒Air moons in mercury pc make for stimulating conversation, gossip, but are kind of detached. I wouldn’t go for deep convos with them unless they also have Fire and Water too.

🎒Earth moon in mercury pc = that friend that never lets anyone in their house

(but they’ve been to your house countless times)

🎒Virgo moon in mercury pc is another level of private especially when it comes to relationships. I swear more than scorpio moons. Most other moons will tell you who they have a crush on early. Virgo moon could be secretly pining for so long and then you find out they’ve already confessed to their crush whom you didn’t even know about and been together for a month. They also don’t like to talk about relationship problems with anyone other than their partner and don’t like people—>strangers/acquaintances asking about their relationship so yeah respect their boundaries.

🎒Sagittarius moon in mercury pc like to tease and provoke their partner. Sometimes they may like to make their partner jealous and they also get jealous easily. They know how to have fun, enjoy life and a big, hearty meal!! Big biters. They are definitely foodies haha. They can have adorably chubby cheeks bc they eat a lot unless they have fast metabolism. They pull funny faces. Lowkey the opposite of virgo moon.

🎒Taurus moon in mercury pc is also a foodie but the difference is they take time to appreciate each bite whereas sag just stuffs their face lmao a little too self rewarding but at least they’re having a good time

🎒Taurus, Sag, Cancer = ultimate foodies

🎒Most earth moons in mercury pc are so grateful, humble and down to earth especially virgo. Sag and pisces in mercury pc can come off as ‘out of touch’ as these signs are less comfortable in mercury (I forgot the word for it). I can imagine rich kids with sag/pisces moon in merc pc being insufferable yikes.

🎒Gemini moon in mercury pc is eccentric but in a charming way?

🎒Pisces moon in mercury pc are so “wrong time wrong place” people, it’s weirdly hilarious. They’re either the embodiment of TMI or so mysterious you hardly know anything about them

🎒Fire moons in the moon pc are so entertaining. They’re delivery is always hilarious bc they’re so dramatic and passionate. People are attracted to them like moths to a flame

🎒Scorpio moon in mercury pc and Aries moon in mars pc are scary as. Don’t want to be on their bad side. Scorpio anger is more of a silent, fatal, death stare whereas Aries is explosive, fuming anger. They’re fiercely loyal and protective of their loved ones but the down side is they can be biased; defending the person in the wrong sometimes

🎒Moon signs in the same element get along really well I.e. capricorns get along with virgo and taurus. Aries get along with Leo and sag. For example, same-element-moons in the mercury pc can be completely different people but understand each other so well. In mars pc, they have similar energy and hype each other up, they’re each other’s personal hype man lol

🎒I feel like signs with the same modality attract each other. For example sag moon and virgo moon in mercury pc (modality: mutable) both have such different beliefs and values yet they appreciate traits in the other that they lack and get along well as friends. For example virgo is professional and stoic, and sag is funny but their bond is built on mutual respect rather than similarities between each other. And also, one of my virgo moon in merc pc friend likes a lot of celebrities with sag moon in merc pc (can’t remember who, my bad).

🎒Gemini moons in moon pc think through their emotions rather than feel. They overanalyse social interactions more often than not

🎒Sometimes sag in mercury pc can be ungrateful. They always want more, more, more without showing gratitude, for example with food especially. Sometimes they need to sit back and smell the roses.

🎒Aquarius moon in the moon pc is really detached. Throw in a bit of Pisces and it’s just a whole unstable mess. In extreme cases, narcissism/serial killers/psychotism. I can imagine because at their worst, pisces is delusional, and aquarius has the ability to detach from any emotion including empathy.

🎒Aries moon in moon pc have self respect. They never say anything to belittle themselves. They’re honest and don’t appreciate pity and so they talk about their hardships in a normal tone (not a pitiful one). They’re also arguably the most hardworking people out there and you’ll never be bored around them once you get to know them.

🎒Capricorn moons have impeccable patience and they’re really so caring, parental like

🎒Capricorn/scorpio moon in Jupiter pc is so subtly powerful, I love them

🎒Scorpio moon in venus pc’s intense stare >>>>>>>>>>>>>

🎒Libra moon’s habit of copying their partners habits, speech patterns, fashion and interests is so cute. Matching couple outfits/bracelets etc. are their jam

🎒Cancer/Pisces moon in mars pc can get teary eyed when someone raises their voice at them. They’re also very comfortable to be around

🎒Libra moon in the mars pc is so chill like they just don’t give a shit

🎒Capricorn moon in the mars pc is really good at this ——-> 😐

stone faced hot mfs

🎒Leo moons are sooo funny especially moon/mars/jupiter pc

🎒Fire moons in the mars pc are a whole load of fun and dramatic

🎒Aries moon in mercury pc is really resilient and they rarely give up on their goals. Sag moon in mercury pc on the other hand just sometimes can’t be bothered. The most important thing for them is to have fun and be entertained. Leo is kind of a bit of both.

🎒Pisces moon in the moon pc like to vent to people and play the blame game before taking action and solving whatever problem. They’re also healing to be around and very empathetic.

🎒Taurus moon and gemini moon in moon pc get along quite well

🎒Virgo moons can be so naggy but it’s how they show their love

🎒Virgo moon in mercury/venus pc is the type to immediately wash their dishes after eating. Sag moon in mercury pc is the type to leave uncleaned dishes on the dining table after eating, then eat more in the middle of the night and so adding more dirty dishes to the table overnight and then the stack of dirty dishes continue to go neglected for a few days or even longer. They’d make for an interesting horrible roommate duo.

Also thank you so much for 700 followers!! I love you guys ❤️ Enjoy this post.

#astrology notes #astrology observations #Persona chart #astro placements #Moon signs

[sixofcrowdaydreams]

Crows Names Written in Kerch (again)

Last night I posted the Kerch alphabet used in Shadow and Bone and played around with writing out the Crows names. That post was pretty messy so I rewrote the names and simplified the explanation about the Kerch language.

Interesting facts about the Kerch language:

Inej’s surname could be spelled as Ghafa or Gafa in Kerch. I wrote both.

Y is not a vowel (or vowel adjacent) in Kerch. This means Jesper’s surname is spelled as Fahee in Kerch.

There is no hard I (as in ice). This makes Wylan’s and Matthias names difficult to write.

I wrote out their names using a short I (as in igloo) on the first line beneath with English name. This spelling pronounces Wylan as Will-lan and Matthias as Matt-i-as. However, I don’t think that this would be the correct way to write their names in Kerch.

Most likely the hard I is substituted with the hard E sound (EE, as in green). I wrote their names this way on the 2nd line beneath their English names.

This makes Wylan pronounced as Wee-lan and Matthias pronounced as Matt-ee-as.

Kerch only uses a K for ka sound. The letter C does not exist. (I suspected this and it was confirmed in the more detailed 2nd letter character chart.)

This means for Wylan’s surname in English Eck is spelled as Ek in Kerch and the English Hendricks is spelled as Hendriks in Kerch.

There is no letter X in Kerch. So there is only the Si— of Crows. Most likely, it would simply be written as 6 of Crows in Kerch. The number 6 in Kerch is the 2nd line beneath the English Six.

Most likely a word with an X would substitute the letter X for a KS combo. Example: ax in English would be spelled as aks in Kerch.

That would make them the Siks of Crows in Kerch

Capital and lower case letters are not distinguished, therefore there is only one letter case.

#six of crows #shadow and bone #wylan van eck #matthias helvar #back on my bullshit #meta

[vurren]

Furbish From a Linguistic Perspective

hi! if you're familiar with furbies you probably know the very short conlang (a sketch fictlang in particular) furbish! furbish is the language furbies speak before you "teach" them english by taking care of them. i will only be covering the '98 language, as the 2005 and 2010 language updates break some of the language rules the '98 version sets up, and I don't want to deal with that atm. also, do note i'm not a linguist, i just watch a lot of conlang critic

Phonology

Consonants

furbish has 9 consonants, with one digraph (wh) counting as a consonant for simplicity's sake. these consonants are /m/, /n/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /hw/ or /h/, /l/, and /w/.

Vowels

furbish has 6 vowels (including 2 dipthongs): /i/, /u/, /eɪ/, /o/, /aɪ/, and /ɑ/.

Syllables

syllables are made up of vowels and consonants, shown in this chart. There are a total of 35 syllables in furbish.

Morphology

to make a word, syllables are put together using dashes, though some words are syllables on their own. additionally, new words can be created by putting a dash in between two existing words; like "ay-ay-lee-koo" (listen), a compound of "ay-ay" (look) and "lee-koo" (sound).

Grammar/Syntax

furbish seems to work almost the same as english grammar-wise, with a few differences. like many languages, it follows the subject–verb–object word order. for example, "i love you" would be "kah may-may u-nye". verbs have no conjugations and there are no tenses in furbish, along with there being no distinction between a singular and plural noun. most adjectives and nouns in furbish also work as verbs, and a word/phrase equivalent of "to be" does not exist. verbs have no conjugation, and adverbs go in front of the verb. it has two final particles, "doo" as a way to express that a question is being asked (similar to "ka" in japanese) and "wah" as a way to express excitement.

Proposals (Non-Canon)

i have a few proposals to make furbish a fuller language. for starters, making more syllable combinations for coining new words. secondly, a furby alphabet. each letter would represent a furbish syllable. another thing is filler words. i believe "ah" would be a great filler word, as furbies tend to say it a lot while being played with. i also suggest "doo", which could work as the furbish speaker questioning what they should say. finally, i've come up with a canon name for furbish in furbish. "kah-lee-koo", a compound of "kah" (me) and "lee-koo" (sound). roughly translated it means "my sound".

I'm autistic about furbies and conlangs fascinate me, so I had to make this!! I hope you all enjoyed :]

#furby #furbish #conlang #linguistics #conlanging #furby fandom #vurr.txt #autism off the charts #i wrote this a while ago but am JUST posting it now

[physalian]

The Fantasy Language Translation Matrix

Whether you intend to write your own full-blown lexicon with different verb tenses and formal vs informal language, need unique words for spellwork, or just need new names for all your foreign places, behold… the Physalian patented Fantasy Language Translation Matrix.

(I kid. I have no idea if I’m the first to come up with this)

**Disclaimer!** After rolling out your fresh new vocab off the word assembly line, make sure you google it and that it doesn’t already exist and mean something you don’t intend.

Step 1: Pick your Derivative

You can make it sound completely foreign and like total gibberish, but I find it easier for you and other people to read if they have some real-world reference to compare it to, and so they have a clue for which pronunciation rules to rely on. For example: I did not know who René Descartes was my freshman year of high school. His last name was in my algebra book, and I, thinking he was Greek like so many other ancient mathematicians, pronounced his name as if he were Greek “Des-kart-ees.” I got made fun of.

Spare your readers the humiliation.

So say I want a vaguely… Russian/Latin/Italian influence. As opposed to French. Cool. That’s my starting point.

Step 2: Reorder the most common letters from English to your new language

In English, the average use of the standard alphabet by letter in order is this:

Ignore your vowels for a second. I don’t use charts like this on the regular, I use the Wheel of Fortune method and focus on RSTLNE, then go from there. I also want to make sure this isn’t a complete 1:1 ratio so it’s not super obvious I’m just juggling letters around, so I’ll knock out some “duplicate” letters and swap out singular letters for specific sounds.

The goal of this isn’t to stare at two existing language matrices and perfectly match them up, it’s to take the most common sounds and letters in English and make them new, common sounds in your new language, to sound more uniform and like you have a real etymology.

And I end up with this:

This might look a little confusing on how I got from A to Z so the basics:

All my vowels remain in the same place, they just get juggled around so I don’t end up with 8 consonants next to each other and word garbage

My “duplicate” letters are combined so I have more room for the new sounds, like c/k, f/ph/gh, h/wh, s/z. The new sounds then get the spare letters I had left over

Common english suffixes get reduced down so the pattern isn’t as obvious

If you want to include accent marks, this is your chance

I wanted to really emphasize the long “e” and long “i” sounds, so those got extra attention

Step 3: Translating

Oftentimes this is not perfect, or you end up with a word that just doesn’t fit the rest of your new vocabulary, because English is the bastard lovechild of German, Latin, Danish, and French.

I start with English, usually, but if the English word is too short or too long, I translate it first into another language, like Spanish, and go from there. Like “bus” vs “autobus”.

Using your matrix, go one by one. Let’s use a word like “letter”.

English: L-E-T-T-E-R

New: T-A-C-C-A-Z

Step 4: Polishing

So now I have my new word: “Taccaz”

Which is serviceable. I can throw an accent on either A or fiddle with the Z. I can start with “carta” instead and end up with “kizci”. The matrix is just a starting point. It’s designed to streamline the process when I’m otherwise feeling uncreative and in a rush, and it moves very quickly when I need to come up with full phrases and sentences that someone would actually say.

Step 5: Full sentences

This is only if you’re really digging deep and not coming up with the occasional fantasy curse word or new name for your fantasy land/realm/noun etc.

For this you’re going to need lots of tables. I based mine off romance languages because I know Spanish and romance languages make sense. This is where you decide how many pronouns, if any, you’re going to use, how the infinitive changes based on past, present, or future tense, how many nouns the word references, etc.

This is… a lot. Way more than you’d ever need for your manuscript. Ever. But I did it just for my own sake. Does it get long? Yes. Does it get tedious? Yes. The point here is to have little pre-manufactured word bytes you can plug and play with, with as little mental effort as possible so you can save it for the rest of your work.

I also came up with very common words already conjugated, like “to be” so I can just glance and type without having to remember to take “is” and go through the process over and over again.

Which means that I can take an entire sentence and translate it to my new language in about two minutes.

English: The payoff is worth it, this is so satisfying. New, roughly: Nu kioyb ela fyzip ne, iski ela valo nicenbalaev.

Of course, you can keep tinkering until you get something that’s easier on the eyes (I’ve been working with this language for years so I can read it pretty well), but not all languages are smooth and pretty and simple.

To be frank: Most readers will just gloss over this stuff anyway, but it shows that you put in the effort and it enhances the lore and the immersion when you do this. At least in the written medium. You can’t ignore it if this is meant to be in a screenplay.

Is this what a language professor would do or recommend? Probably not, I have no idea. Does it work? Yes. I have a fully functioning grammatical system where any input can give me a legible output.

To make this yourself, just change the order of the letters around, adjust your shortcuts, and come up with your own common sounds for those last two rows. The conjugation matrix is where you can really make it distinct, assuming you are basing yours off a romance language, which you don't have to.

—

And there you have it!

Don’t forget to vote in the dialogue poll before it closes!

#writing resources #writing advice #writing tips #writing tools #writing a book #writing #writeblr #fantasy #sci fi #fictional language #language #world building

[kjagasanpijrtu]

Hi! I do conlang commissions!

Call me Ire (she/they). I'm 23 and I'm away too into worldbuilding for my own good. I love talking about all these worlds locked up in my head and giving advice. My askbox is open for anyone looking for advice or guidance, or just interest in any of my worlds or conlangs

Speaking of conlangs, I DO COMMISSIONS I CAN AND WILL MAKE ONE FOR YOU IF YOU WANT. I may or may not have a special interest in linguistics lmao

For anyone interested in my credentials, I've made 7 or so conlangs and contributed to a few extra, and I specialize in synthetic and polysynthetic inflection. My commissions are open and actively support me while I put myself through the hell that is american higher education. I'd love it so much if you'd let me make a language for you!

Pricing and terms below the cut, dm if interested <3

Ko-fi Venmo

I divide the languages I make into 4 parts: Phonology, Grammar, Dictionary, and Writing System. I charge a certain amount for each part depending on the desired complexity for each, and I can do all or some parts depending on your needs. For example I can make an entire language from scratch or I can focus on, say, just the phonology or dictionary if you would prefer to do the other parts yourself

In other words you're basically ordering a custom language like a sandwich, as stupid as that sounds. I'm very flexible so don't be afraid to tell me what you're looking for, especially if it's weird (I love weird, don't hold back). Just beware that complexity charges may apply at any stage if what you're looking for is particularly laborious

TL;DR: A barebones conlang with 150 words and no writing system costs about $35. A language with the full complexity and dumbassery of English with 550 words would be $138 (and might incur some complexity charges)

Additional details at the bottom (they are important please read them). Interspersed are some samples of writing systems I've made, all of which have alt text that contain some juicy details. Prices are in USD

Phonology /fəʊ.nɑːɫə.d͡ʒi/

How you want the language to sound. Choose one.

Simple Phonology - $5

I'll make a vowel and consonant chart for the language's phonemic inventory with IPA characters (as seen above). This of course will also include a romanized alphabet you can use to make your own words if you wish.

Full Phonotactics - $10

Everything in Simple Phonology plus more details including charts of possible syllable structure & consonant clusters, vowel stress & tone, and any other phonological feature you'd like to add.

Grammar ∅

How you want the language to work. Can be similar to or vastly different from English, all up to you. Choose one.

Basic Grammar - $20

I'll make rules that cover basic sentences and questions, including basic inflection for nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs if applicable. Includes ~50 basic and grammatical words.

Complex Grammar - $30

Everything in basic grammar plus extra rules that cover complex sentences and word derivation (which may give you extra free words!)

Natlang Grammar - $50

All the bells and whistles. All of the above plus extra declensions, inconsistencies, and situational grammatical constructs. You'll be putting me through the wringer.

Dictionary 📖

The words themselves, even the weird ones.

Words - $10 Per 100 Words

I'll build you a dictionary for your language, word by word. You're welcome to also interpret this as 10¢ per word if you just need a handful. Plus I have a word bank so you can customize what general topics you want to focus on.

Writing System 𐎧𐏁𐎠𐎹𐎰𐎡𐎹

How you want your language to be natively written (my fav part). See below to decide what works best for your language if you want one.

Alphabet - $20 ΑΛΦΑΒΕΤ

A writing system where each character represents a single sound. A versatile choice that can work for pretty much any language, as evidenced by the Latin alphabet and its variations being the most used writing system in the world.

Abjad - $25 أبجد عربي

The predecessor to the alphabet which only writes consonants and rarely includes vowels. Best used for languages that have a heavy focus on consonants and where vowels don't carry much grammatical meaning, like Arabic, Ge'ez, or Aramaic.

Alpha-Syllabary/Abugida - $25 한글 अबुगिदा

A middleground option between an alphabet and a syllabary, where each character is made up of smaller parts that come together to represent a syllable. Another versatile choice used all over the Indian subcontinent and the Korean Peninsula.

Syllabary - $35 ひらがな カタカナ ᏣᎳᎩ

A writing system where every character represents a syllable. Fits best with languages that have lots of open syllables, like Japanese, Inuktitut, or Cherokee. More expensive because syllabaries often contain a large number of characters.

Logography - $1 Per Word 漢字

A writing system where every character reassembles a whole word or concept. Can work for any kind of language but works best with languages that are phonologically dense and/or have simple grammar.

Mixed - Negotiable وαत ðə ファⲕ 암 あй रीᏗŋ

Want a system that incorporates more than one of these? Great! Those are my favorite to make!

Number System - $8 ٩ ٨ ٧ ٦ ٥ ٤ ٣ ٢ ١ ٠ I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX

If you want I can create a written number system to pair with your writing system. It can be simple or complex and can be any base you want (within reason of course).

To make this as easy as possible for me to understand what to make for you, please provide a reference, idea, or general vibe for each part of the language. I understand not everyone has that much knowledge about languages so I won't request anything too specific, but examples from real-world languages usually give me a lot to work with.

Terms ⚠️

Final product will be a single Excel Spreadsheet (.xlsx file) for one language that contains instructions on how to use and expand the language. Unfortunately I don't have enough experience with vector files or fonts to provide digital versions of the writing systems I make so photos of hand-drawn characters are all I offer for now.

Payment is minimum 50% upfront and the rest upon completion before the final product is delivered, as it divides the trust evenly between two unfamiliar parties. I accept payment through Venmo and Ko-fi only (no crypto or other bullshit).

Refunds: if something occurs where I will not be able to fulfill a commission, I will do what I can to return any money given to me. However if significant work has been put into a commission before an event that prevents its completion, the initial 50% payment will not be refunded.

Usage: if the language I make for you is used in a publicly released creative project, I ask that you credit me. Please notify me if you plan on using your language commercially.

I maintain the right to alter terms and pricing.

Thank you for reading this far ur amazing <3

#commission #comm #conlang #constructed language #language #langblr #scriptwriting #calligraphy #pinned post #worldbuilding #world building #fantasy #linguistics #creative writing