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minkmousesworld · 3 years

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tugs at hair in exasperation

gakuen au giyuu who dons a pretty sailor uniform <3 <3 <3 his dark blue skirt contrasts sweetly with his pale thighs, and your abrupt epiphany of how thick his thighs are in the middle of a lesson must be so inconvenient for you! his plump fat spilling from his stockings onto the seat invokes such a strong urge to fondle and paw at them, right?

poor baby definitely thinks you’re judging him though, do you dislike him? are his legs not sufficient enough to fulfill your desires? in shame, he turns up to school the next day in tights, dark fabric completely concealing his luscious thighs. desperately tries to make it up to you, if you’re not satisfied with his legs he must resort to hiding his legs to please you!

like!! giyuu beloved no!!!! your thighs save my life;;; (⁎⁍̴̆Ɛ⁍̴̆⁎)

oh, what to do now? you’re gonna have to tend to your precious lover, so self conscious about his body. no one can stand a day passing without seeing his thighs all wrapped flush from view, but he certainly catches your intense gaze on him,,,, although he may harbour doubts, he’s so flustered at the attention. absolutely unnerving, right? rubbing his thighs together, pressing his breasts together;;; delectable. we definitely must treat him to a nice time now!

the locker room during recess seems fitting enough. the sound of his queries about your intent bounce off the walls and resonate throughout ,,, guess he’s gotta hush down his cute sounds later. someone as pretty as him shouldn’t have to do so, but would he rather you take him in the middle of the classroom? let everyone see you fuck your gorgeous slut of a boyfriend? squeaks from giyuu answer your question sure enough when you press him up against a random locker and kneel down.

grgrgrgr feral crying,,,, i want to rip his tights off with my teeth,,,, his thighs would clamp on your neck at the sensation, it’s so overwhelming! he’s just not used to such promiscuous touches,,, no matter how much you fuck him dumb, shy reactions are never alien each and every time, hmm?

just how reliable are those words, though? when you’re met with his throbbing pussy uncovered; dripping his slick onto your face and lewd scents wafting from his hole, he’s just a needy cocksleeve to be used at the end of the day— no matter his reactions.

leave hickeys on his inner thighs, indulge in the scent of his hot skin, suck the sweat the cascades down his legs off; show your appreciation for him! giyuu rewards you with his squeals and moans very well, look how he’s enjoying it <3 to the side, you could spy his shirt and bra already discarded on the bench. giyuu has gone ahead to rid of them so he may pinch and rub his swollen nipples to distract him from the fact that you won’t fuck his cunt already! pink buds on his tits for the sole purpose of being played with— he should probably just stop wearing a bra if he gropes his own breasts this much.

our dearest also attempts to hump your face while you knead his thighs in hopes you’ll pay attention to his pussy, what a whore <3 yes, we can see the puddle of pussy juices pooling on the floor, but being ungrateful leads one no where </3 our baby has got to learn some manners! pin his hips to the cold metal to stem his movements. or don’t, if you enjoy him rubbing his pussy lips on you.

giyuu’s clit is so painful by the time you decide to nibble on it, and your fingers snaking into his cunt force his hands to seek the solace of latching onto the support of your head. someone is gonna discover the two of you if he keeps up his squirming, stop it </3 surely he wouldn’t desire to have a stranger see you eat him out while he caresses his breasts, yeah?

want to torture his cunt until every sensation is absolutely too boggling for him h,,, i’m a faithful pussy eater ʕʘ‿ʘʔ ensure that feelings of pleasure clog his womb and eventually explode in a fit of lust!! let him squirt his cum on your cheeks, giyuu deserves it <3 don’t stop just there though!! pull another orgasm out of him!! you can do it!! drool and tears are already mixing together, what’s more liquid to that?

overstimulation drives him to pry your head out of his pussy, it’s too much? he can’t take it anymore? yet he was practically begging for you earlier. our whore cant back out now— just relax, unravel that knot in his uterus and get him to spurt his sweet essence over you once more <3333 at the end he’s choking up thanks, so it’s all worth it!

clean him up afters, make him lick his cum off your face, kiss his neck for being such a good boy <3

but make sure he returns to class without his tights, nothing but his soaked skirt to obscure anyone else from spying on his raw cunt still dedicate from the plethora of orgasm <3 promise if giyuu goes through the rest of the day without leaking any of his pussy juices, maybe you’ll reward him by breeding him once the two of you return to the comfort of your home. surely, he’s pleased at such thought?

to feel his womb burst with your cum, both his pussy and cute ass fucked till they burn in the wake of desire? to have all his holes moulded to fit only you? perhaps at the end, you’ll grow sick of his slutty expressions and ride his face to revel at the way he gags? or how his throat bulges from your cock? giyuu can feel his lower body shiver at the thought of you pounding into him and filling him with your babies already <3 the thought of him attending classes with your seed still plugged inside him drives him crazy to no end.

nowadays, no one sees you two during break time anymore. only reports of seeing you rush into the locker rooms and exiting with giyuu on shaky legs can give them a clue on what happens then. it’s nigh routine to fuck his thighs, or his pussy in there. or on days when classmates notice giyuu has no bra on when they have pe? perhaps they already know why you tug him into the store room, his perky breasts are a shame to NOT be splattered in cum <3

-☆ no nie

I am so absolutely in love with your words you have no idea how much I adore your work you are absolutely amazing I shsgshgdjdhd absolutely delighted with you and your style-

but

biting his thighs through his tights? leave bite marks on his skin while he shivers, wet and eager for your lips to touch his skin, but too shy to beg you for it, until it becomes so sufficient that he can only cling to your hair, mumbling something that you can only remotely recognize as a request to stop teasing him <333

when he whimpers, squeezing his chest to weaken the excitement — he is so rosy, seeing your look at his body, but it becomes so unimportant when you rub his painfully sensitive clit again, gently push your fingers inside and leave wet marks on his skin, turning him into an even more excited mess.

but giyuu, whose pussy easily becomes very squishy and he is very shy because of this, since even with the weakest excitement creates loud and "sloppy" sounds <333 he's so rosy when you tell him that his hole is very glad to see you while you rub him through his panties, soaking the fabric with his slick♡

he is constantly wet, so he needs to drink a lot of water, and you constantly make him spill water on his shirt, since he does not wear a bra during workouts </3

'faithful pussy eater' sounds like an achievement I want to get <333

#.spicy♡#🐹.cute mouse #🐹.☆nonnie♡#🍑.giyuu tomioka #🌰.t*#🌰.penetration giving #🌰.semi-public sex #🌰.oral sex #🌰.degradation #🌰.rough treatment #🌰.cum inflation #🌰.feminine clothing #🌰.fingering #🌰.heavy petting #🌰.breeding #🌰.hyperstimulation #<3 <3 <3

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lingthusiasm · 4 years

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Transcript Episode 44: Schwa, the most versatile English vowel

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 44: Schwa, the most versatile English vowel. 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 44 show notes page.

[Music]

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

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about schwa and stress. First, we made our LingComm grant goal! We’re now giving out three grants to linguistics communication projects. The deadline for those applications is the 1st of June wherever you are, which is very soon, so make sure to get those applications in. That’s 2020, in case you’re listening from the future.

Lauren: We’re actually giving out four. We are giving out more than we originally planned, thanks to Claire Bowern funding a fourth LingComm grant on a project that looks at minoritised languages.

Gretchen: Those grant applications are due on June 1st, 2020. If you’re interested in applying for that, go to the website lingcomm.org. That’s “comm” with two Ms. You’ll see all the details there.

Lauren: If you’re listening to this deep in the future, you can go to lingcomm.org to see what great projects we funded.

Gretchen: Indeed you can.

Lauren: We now have new Lingthusiasm merch. We have little badges for you to wear through Redbubble, which is really exciting. They’re super cute.

Gretchen: Interesting! I think I would call those “pins” or maybe “buttons.” Whatever you call them, they are round circular things that you can pin on your clothes or backpacks that say fun linguistics things on them.

Lauren: Hm. I’d call them “button badges” as well.

Gretchen: I think “buttons” is kind of ambiguous because you don’t know if that’s a kind of button you use that you sew into your clothing or that you pin into your clothing. Maybe I like “pins”? Anyway, you can get these at lingthusiasm.com/merch along with more sticker designs and other Lingthusiasm merch like scarves with the International Phonetic Alphabet on them and other fun things like that.

Lauren: This month’s Patreon bonus episode is about numbers. We look at different counting systems, different number systems, and what using your fingers to count says about you. You can get access to this and 38 other bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Okay. I have a puzzle for us.

Lauren: Awesome. I love a puzzle.

Gretchen: I’m gonna give you a few words, then you can tell me what they have in common. Our words are “about.”

Lauren: “About.”

Gretchen: “Broken.”

Lauren: “Broken.”

Gretchen: And “council.”

Lauren: “Council.”

Gretchen: Any thoughts for what they have in common?

Lauren: My immediate thought was I’m sad we don’t have Lingthusiasm think time music.

Gretchen: We do have theme music. Maybe we could play it a bit again.

Lauren: Hm. Ah. “About, broken, council” – they all start with different letters. They all have different letters in them. I’m assuming it’s not something about what they mean. They’re all two syllables long.

Gretchen: That’s true. I should give you a couple more examples that also have this thing in common to see if that helps.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: We have “about, broken, council, potato,” and “support.”

Lauren: Oh, “potato.” The goes my two-syllable theory. Definitely nothing semantic about their meaning. They still all have completely different letters. You’ve actually made it harder with more data, Gretchen. Harder. That’s not useful.

Gretchen: The thing we wanna think about is not just what letters are in them but what sounds are in them.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: Is there any sound that all five of these words have in common?

Lauren: If I look at the spelling, they all have completely different vowels. They don’t even have the same vowels. But if I listen to how they’re spoken, think about “about, broken,” and “council,” [Gasp] “potato,” and “support,” they all have schwa.

Gretchen: They all have schwa, which I know is your favourite vowel. I have created this quiz just for you.

Lauren: Excellent. Thank you so much. They all have this /ə/ sound. It’s the coolest little letter that doesn’t exist as a written letter in English. It’s one of the coolest sounds in English. I love it. We’re doing a whole episode. It’s schwa time.

Gretchen: It’s schwa time. So, /əbɑʊt/ has that /ə/ in the first syllable. /bɹoʊkən/ has that /ə/ in the second syllable. /kɑʊnsəl/ has that /ə/ there – /pətɛɪtoʊ/ /səpoɹt/. There’s the /ə/ going all the way through. Here’s your second quiz. There’s a special thing about this particular set of five words. They all have schwa in them, but they all have something else that’s different about them.

Lauren: They’re all spelt with the actual different vowels. When I learnt that schwa was the sound that hid across all of the vowels – it doesn’t matter what one you write, if it’s in an unstressed syllable, and we’ll talk about that, it becomes a schwa – it explained to me why I find writing some words so difficult. If you don’t know how to spell “potato” and someone says /pətɛɪtoʊ/, that could be a P-A, that could be a P-U. It’s really hard to tell. But all of those are written with different vowels but sound the same in speech.

Gretchen: Yeah! You get words like /dɛfənɪtli/, which was one of these words that I didn’t know how to spell for the longest time. It would give me this red underline and I was like, “Why? This looks totally reasonable to me!” Then, I had to learn that the schwa – /dɛfənɪtli/ – the schwa there wasn’t spelled with an A, it was spelled with an I. You really can’t tell in English because every single vowel letter can represent this particular vowel sound, which is really frustrating when you’re a kid learning how to spell and yet is really cool when you’re a linguist because it’s one of these mysterious things that once you notice it, it’s everywhere. Yet, you can go your whole life without noticing it.

Lauren: We talked about all the vowels back in Episode 17 with vowel gymnastics and how, unlike consonants, vowels exist in this space and they all shift around like a multi-dimensional slide trombone. I guess that’s why we went with “gymnastics” as an analogy instead of “multi-dimensional trombones.”

Gretchen: I mean, if someone wants to design a multi-dimensional trombone for me, I’ll take it.

Lauren: We talked a teeny bit about schwa in that episode, but I have been wanting to do an episode all about schwa for ages. Here we are. Exciting times.

Gretchen: I think we should also mention what schwa looks like when it’s written in the International Phonetic Alphabet because it is part of your icon or your whole icon on various different websites, is it not?

Lauren: Yes. If you’ve ever seen the upside-down E looking thing that is the Superlinguo logo, that is the sch – so schwa is interesting in that it has a name. It also has, like all of the vowels, a representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet. That representation looks like an upside-down E. I’m not normally one of these people that has lots of opinions about fonts, but when it comes to how it’s written, it is not an upside-down E. This is something I’m very fussy about.

Gretchen: What is the difference between a schwa and an upside-down lowercase E? Please tell the class because I don’t know.

Lauren: If you turn it back up the other way, it looks really unproportioned. It’s like the top of the E is just way too high up. It looks all weirdly stretched.

Gretchen: So, the thicknesses of the letters and so on are weirdly stretched? Is that the thing?

Lauren: Yeah. The height of that little loopy bit of the E, if you turn it back the other way and try and use it as an E, looks a bit – it just makes it look like the E is gonna fall over. It’s really wobbly.

Gretchen: Okay. I feel like we need to point this out that you know this because you made schwa cookie cutters.

Lauren: Yes. I designed and 3-D printed a schwa cookie cutter a few years ago for Christmas gingerbread.

Gretchen: Then, a very helpful person on the internet said, “Couldn’t you just have used an E cookie cutter and turned the cookies upside-down?” and you were like, “No, no, no, because the thickness is different.”

Lauren: No. You absolutely cannot.

Gretchen: I feel like, historically speaking, it probably was an upside-down E though because I know a lot of the IPA symbols are upside-down versions or rotated versions of existing letters because that way they didn’t have to typeset new letters back in the metal printing days. But I believe you that, now that we have digital formats, schwa can have slightly different line thicknesses.

Lauren: Yes. It has its own representation. It has a name that not many other vowels have names. Technically, it’s a mid-central vowel, which just means it’s just in the centre. It’s not high. It’s not low. It’s not front. It’s not back. It’s not any of these dimensions that we talk about. It’s just the most /ə/ vowel that exists, which is why everything ends up going towards it when it’s not stressed because it’s the least exciting thing to do with your mouth. There’s actually a Wikipedia entry for the mid-central vowel – that /ə/ vowel – but schwa is so iconic there’s also a separate Wikipedia page just to talk about it as “schwa.” This is how strong its brand is.

Gretchen: Schwa’s brand is strong. Especially for the vowels, normally if we talk about vowels, we talk about /i/ or /ɛ/ or /ʊ/. You just say the name of the vowel – or sometimes people say the name of the symbol. Like, “small cap I” or –

Lauren: “Open O.”

Gretchen: “Open O” or something like this. Schwa has got this name that doesn’t refer to the shape of its symbol, it’s got its own name. The thing that’s always tormented me about the name “schwa” is, like, it’s a cool name. I will grant you this. But it doesn’t have schwa itself in the name.

Lauren: This is true and very disappointing.

Gretchen: Other symbols, like “theta” – /θɛɪtʌ/ has a theta in it. Great. We’re doing a great job. Good job, theta. Schwa does not have a schwa in it, and I find that kind of disappointing.

Lauren: Disappointing.

Gretchen: However, I looked up the history of the name “schwa.” Apparently, “schwa” used to have a schwa in it and then it stopped, which I now think is even better. The word “schwa” is from the Hebrew /ʃva/ for which the classical pronunciation was apparently /ʃəwa/.

Lauren: Ah, so before modern Hebrew, it had a schwa in it. It was like /ʃəwa/?

Gretchen: Exactly. /ʃwa/, /ʃəwa/ – maybe we should start calling it /ʃəwa/ because then it would have a /ʃəwa/ in it.

Lauren: Amazing. I think one of the things I like about the name of schwa is that the name itself encapsulates its history.

Gretchen: Yeah. Initially /ʃva/ or /ʃəwa/ is the name of one of the sets of dots that indicates this sound – because Hebrew writing, along with Arabic, are normally written with just the consonants. Then, if you want to indicate what the vowels are, you can add these extra little dots and bits above and below the consonants which, most of the time, aren’t used but are sometimes used for children or for contexts where you wanna be super precise. One of the names of these sets of dots indicating the vowels is /ʃəwa/, which was used to indicate either the /ə/ sound, the schwa sound itself, or /ɛɪ/, which in most languages the /ɛɪ/ sound is written with what English calls a letter E. If you think of the /ɛː/ as in /kæfɛɪ/ or /foɹtɛɪ/, those Es are that /ɛɪ/ sound. This kind of explains to me why it’s an upside-down E and not an upside-down literally any other vowel because every vowel letter can become a schwa sound because in this origin it could be used for either one of these two sounds.

Lauren: Nifty. Even though it’s pronounced /ʃva/ in modern Hebrew, the spelling of “schwa” itself is actually from the German spelling for it. I think this was one of the reasons I like the name “schwa” is that it encapsulates its history being borrowed from Hebrew orthography. Then, in the 19th Century, a lot of German linguists used it for that sound. That S-C-H spelling is the German spelling rather than any other language. Most satisfyingly, it was first used by a guy called Schmeller who has his name spelt S-C-H as well.

Gretchen: Johann Andreas Schmeller, who also used the schwa. Maybe that’s why he liked it.

Lauren: It became big in the 19th Century and definitely by the end of the 19th Century/Early 20th Century it was being used in texts to represent that sound.

Gretchen: Schwa is also very common in German. A lot of words that end in E in German have that E pronounced as a schwa. The name what in English would be Gabe – the German name /gaːbə/ – that /ə/ at the end is also a schwa.

Lauren: It definitely pops up in a lot of languages because it’s quite efficient.

Gretchen: You also get this optional schwa sound with Es at the end of the word in French. You can have /lɔ̃ːg/ but also /lɔ̃ːgə/, which is the word for “long.” There’s an E there that can be optionally pronounced. When it is pronounced, it’s pronounced kind of like schwa. This gets to something interesting because German and French have these schwas that are spelled with the letter E at the end of a lot of their words. English, instead, has these completely silent Es at the end of a lot of its words.

Lauren: The bane of all children learning to read in English – the silent E.

Gretchen: Oooh, “bane.” There’s an example! Words like “bane” and “fame” and “fine” and “bone” and “meme” – that one is not one that I learned when I was in Grade 4 spelling class. There’re all these words that end in silent E in English. The rule that I learned when I was in Grade 5 spelling class was the silent E makes the vowel say its own name.

Lauren: Oh, I like that. I never learnt that. That’s very handy, trying to get your head around the rules of reading English.

Gretchen: Yeah. It’s really nice.

Lauren: I’m really jealous that I never learnt that very efficient way of thinking about what E was doing.

Gretchen: But it’s a rule that’s kind of unsatisfying to me as a linguist now because why should adding an extra vowel to the end of the word change how the vowel in the middle of the word is being pronounced? That’s something that I found unsatisfying as a budding linguist. What sort of process is that?

Lauren: I am going – I mean, I know the answer. But if I had not known the answer, I would’ve taken a wild guess at it being retrospectively attempting to make sense of a historical process by pretending that there’s some kind of reason for it.

Gretchen: I mean, that’s not not what’s going on.

Lauren: The reason why they had to retrospectively come up with this rule is because the E used to be pronounced. It used to be pronounced as our friend schwa. They weren’t just one syllable words. The were two syllable words. It was /banə/ – “bane” – and /famə/ and /hamə/.

Gretchen: Oh, so the schwa actually used to be pronounced there. You’d get, instead of “fine,” like /fɪnə/. Instead of “fame,” /famə/. Instead of “home,” /hoʊmə/ or something like that.

Lauren: Yes. You had two syllables instead of one syllable that we have now for “fine,” “fame,” “home.” Those syllables started with a consonant, ended with a vowel. Then, over time, that schwa comes off at the end. It’s not as easy to always pronounce it – a bit like with the French example. In French at the moment, you can pronounce it, or you don’t have to. It’s starting to erode away at the end of a word. That was the process that happened in English.

Gretchen: Right. This is really interesting because in English and in other Germanic languages as well there’s a difference between the kinds of vowels that you can have in a syllable where there’s a consonant at the end and in a syllable where there isn’t. We have English words “hid” and “hide,” which have /ɪ/ and /ɑɪ/ in them both between H and D. But there’s a word like “hi,” but there isn’t a word in English /hɪ/ or /fɪ/ or /kɪ/ or /mɪ/ even though all of these can be perfectly good as long as there’s another consonant in them.

Lauren: This is where the rules of English syllables interact with the rules of what sounds can go into them. We used to have two syllables in words like “fine” and “fame,” and now we have one. That little E sits there to remind us as a written fossil even though we don’t pronounce it anymore.

Gretchen: It reminds us that the vowel that’s in this first syllable, which is now the only syllable, is the kind that can exist without a consonant after it. Because we can have a word like /hɑɪ/ and not a word like /hɪ/, if there’s that E at the end – you have /hɑɪd/ or something – then that reminds us – and by “us” I mean people who know this history, which is not most modern contemporary English speakers – that this is the kind of word that has the vowel that can exist in open syllables.

Lauren: For the rest of us, it’s just a handy way to spell properly.

Gretchen: There was a special reason why it was schwa that was so easily lost at the end of all of these words like “fine” and “home” and “hide.” That’s because schwa is what’s known as a “reduced vowel.” It’s physically produced for a shorter amount of time than a full vowel like /ɑɪ/ or /i/ or even /ɪ/.

Lauren: It’s what allows us to just sneak it in really quickly in syllables that we’re not really focusing on.

Gretchen: If we produce some syllables faster or quieter than other ones, those faster or quieter symbols tend to also have schwas.

Lauren: This is why schwa crops up in all of these words regardless of what vowel they’re spelt with. I’m pretty sure Lauren who really struggled to spell words because she couldn’t distinguish the vowel because it was being pronounced with schwa when she was learning to spell would’ve said, “Why don’t we just spell all the words with schwa and be done with it?” That wouldn’t be the most practical solution.

Gretchen: The problem is, if we respell English to be consistent and every time we say schwa we write schwa, it works in the short term because we have this transparent relationship between the sound and spelling, which is nice. But the annoying thing – this fact that you can write any English vowel letter for the sound schwa – is also a fact about the structure of English. There are all these words that are related to each other where we can see that relationship more clearly based on the spelling than we can sometimes with the pronunciation. The spelling can help us notice when words are related to each other. If we take up a word pair like “acid” and “acidity” –

Lauren: “Acid” and “acidity.” Well, that -ity bit on the end of “acid” that turns it into “acidity” also changes the vowel to a schwa.

Gretchen: Yeah. /æsɪd/ and /əsɪdəti/ – in the first one we have /æ/ as the first vowel and in the second one we have /ə/. Yet, it still seems pretty intuitive that these words are related to each other. It’s just that when we do have this -ity on the end, we pronounce the main word – instead of /æsɪd/, we say /əsɪd/.

Lauren: It would be inconvenient in the even medium turn to lose the relationship between, say, “courage” and “courageous” just because we have that -ous on the end of “courageous.”

Gretchen: It’s the same thing there. /kʌɹəd͡ʒ/ – the second syllable -age, there’s a schwa. But /kʌɹɛɪd͡ʒəs/ – now there’s a different vowel there. It’s just because we’ve added the -ous on the end. Yet, it’s nice that these two words that are very clearly related to each other still look the same.

Lauren: I guess it’s particularly true as well of those word pairs in English that only differ because of stress. Like /ˈɹɛˌkəɹd/ and /ˌɹəˈkoɹd/ – only different because of stress. Then, we’d be spelling them differently because each one has a schwa in the opposite place.

Gretchen: /ˈɹɛˌkəɹd/ – the schwa is in the /-əɹd/. /ˌɹəˈkoɹd/ – your schwa is in the /ɹə-/. You’d have to /ʃwap/ the – swap the [stutters] /ʃwaz/ – /ʃwap/ the /ʃwʌz/? Wow. That’s really hard to say. Swap the schwas. You wouldn’t know what vowel to recover from the syllable once you started stressing it. It’s the same thing with -ity and -ous. When you make “acid” into “acidity” and “courage” into “courageous,” instead of stressing the /æ/ and the /kəɹ/, you’re stressing the /ɪd/ and the /æd͡ʒ/, if you will.

Lauren: Adding the extra bit to the word shifts where the stress is.

Gretchen: It’s these unstressed syllables where schwa – not every unstressed syllable in English is a schwa, but a heck of a lot of them are.

Lauren: I think we’ll keep the spelling system as it is.

Gretchen: This was something that always used to come up for me back when I used to teach Intro to Linguistics. People would be trying to write things in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the very first time, so they’d go through each word, and they’d say it really slowly and carefully. What that would mean is that instead of saying /əsɪdəti/, they’d say something like /æsɪdɪti/. Okay. Or, instead of saying /kʌɹəd͡ʒ/, /kʌɹɛɪd͡ʒəs/, they’d have /kʌɹɛɪd͡ʒʌs/, /kʌɹɹɛd͡ʒ/.

Lauren: They’ve gone back to stressing every syllable, so the schwas evaporate.

Gretchen: Right! They’d write these words and they’d have no schwas in them all over the place. You’d have to say, “You can say this word like this -- if you’re really saying it slowly and carefully, and you were saying each syllable at once maybe to help someone spell it, you do have the full vowel there some level,” psychologically, for a lot of people, especially because of the spelling that’s influencing you to tell you it’s there. But in normal speech at a regular pace, most of the time you do say schwas a lot. It’s an interesting tension where many of our schwas actually represent a sound that we could recover if you say the word slowly and carefully enough, which is also a reason to keep the spelling where it is because there is some psychological reality to the non-schwa version as well.

Lauren: This discussion is very English-focused, I should say, because it’s something that English seems to do in particular in terms of having this kind of stress and this reducing to schwa on unstressed syllables. In fact, it’s a fairly prominent feature of the English accent. I imagine it’s something that gets transferred when English speakers are learning to speak other languages. It’s probably the closest I’ve come to having the ability to understand what the English accent in other languages must sound like to native speakers of those languages. They must just think that we’re failing to hear vowels all over the place.

Gretchen: “Why do all of your vowels become the same vowel?” I think the inverse is also the case is that it’s one of the trickiest things for people who are learning English from a language that doesn’t do this, which is most of them, to do is be constantly trying to hit this vowel that I don’t even have. “Don’t you want your vowels to all be very distinct from each other?” Schwa or not schwa is this very English thing. The stress part about it being very important which syllable’s stressed and which part of which word is stressed – that’s also a very English thing. I find the most interesting place to notice how important stress is in English is when it comes to poetry.

Lauren: Sure. Because a lot of poetry relies on having certain numbers of syllables. Using stress is one way to explore the rhythm of a poem or a poetic construction.

Gretchen: Right. Some of the oldest English Mother Goose rhymes, nursery rhymes, have a consistent number of stressed bits per line rather than a consistent number of syllables. If you have something like “Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock.” There’s three stress bits per line, but the number of syllables is quite different. The same thing with limericks in English, it’s not that there’s the same number of syllables in each line, it’s that the stress pattern is you have to have three stressed syllables, three stressed syllables, two stress, two stress, three stress. You can do that with a varying number of actual syllables in it. Something like, “There once was a man from Nantucket,” three stresses – “once,” “man,” “tuck.” Nine syllables. But “A tutor who tooted the flute,” also three stress – “tu,” “too,” “flute.” That’s eight syllables. And “A wonderful bird is the pelican,” ten syllables but still three stresses.

Lauren: It’s funny. My brain is so tuned to listening to the stress in these, I actually found it hard to count the syllables as you were going because I was so tuned into the limerick structure of stress.

Gretchen: A lot of very English-y poetry styles, as long as you get the stress right, you can really mess with the syllables because English pays a lot of attention to the stress. Whereas, in French, they don’t have this individual, unpredictable stress at the word level the way English does at all. There’s no /ˈɹɛˌkəɹd/ versus /ˌɹəˈkoɹd/ in French. Everything just gets a bit of stress at the end of the phrase or sentence or utterance or whatever you’re saying. You might say something like “Bonjour,” but you could also say, “Bonjour, comment ça va?” and you just stress the “jour” or the “va.” You don’t have to go anywhere in between and stress anything else. This means that French poetry can’t do this stress counting thing because there’s no stresses for them to count.

Lauren: Ah. Normally, I spend a lot of time going, “Oh, poor English speakers. They’re missing out.” But poor French speakers! They’re missing out on limericks.

Gretchen: I really don’t know how you do a limerick in French. I think you’d have to pick a number of syllables that is approximately equivalent and just do that.

Lauren: We talked about this schwa-syllable relationship being very English-focused for this episode, but it’s not the only language in which schwa appears and is a little bit easy to drop once you have reduced the pronunciation of schwa. French was one example you had. In Indo-Aryan languages as well – these are the languages of the same Into-European family as English but they’re over on the Indian subcontinent, so Hindi. I know about this because I had to learn Nepali. They have schwa as a vowel. A bit like the Hebrew writing system, for this vowel in particular, they just don’t write it down. You have to know when to pronounce this vowel by memorising. For some languages in the family it’s just gone altogether. It’s another example of how schwa in some languages can be really eroded. But not in all languages.

Gretchen: This is actually true in Miꞌkmaq as well, which is an Algonquian language spoken in Eastern Canada. In their writing system they use the apostrophe to represent the schwa sound, but the apostrophe is only added when the schwa is quote-unquote “unpredictable.” If you can predict the schwa, then you just put in the schwa where you know it’s supposed to go because as a speaker you say it. Of course, I am not very good – I don’t speak Miꞌkmaq so I’m not particularly good at predicting where it goes.

Lauren: Unpredictable schwa is almost cooler than unstressed schwa.

Gretchen: You can kind of predict it. Speakers actually know how to do it properly, but it’s not always represented in the writing system which is, I guess, something it has in common with Nepali.

Lauren: Schwa has so many cheeky personalities.

Gretchen: Schwa also shows up in English – speaking of being cheeky – as the vowel sound that people end up producing, if you’re an English speaker, when you’re trying not to make any vowel sound at all. If you’re trying to say the sound that the letter B makes, but you don’t wanna say B, you just wanna say that sound by itself, you probably end up with /bə/, which is still a vowel, it’s just schwa. Because that’s the least vowel you can make.

Lauren: Just adding a little bit so you can get that /bə/ across.

Gretchen: Yeah. It also shows up sometimes in people’s names. I knew somebody called /ksɛnjə/ and a lot of English speakers couldn’t pronounce that /ksə/, the KS, at the beginning of her name, so a lot of people ended up saying /kəsɛnjə/ by inserting a little schwa between because that was how they were able to keep both the K and the S.

Lauren: Very handy. Although, I like unpredictable schwa in Miꞌkmaq, one of the best things about schwa popping up in the particular context of unstressed syllables in English means that schwa is set up for being just a really great source of jokes because, when it comes to English, schwa is never stressed. I think that’s a life motto we can all get behind.

Gretchen: This means that there are people who’ve made t-shirts saying, “I want to be a schwa, it’s never stressed.”

Lauren: There’s a great photo from Sandy Abuadas who has made cookies for her students with schwa on them so that her students’ finals will be stressless.

Gretchen: I love it! It’s so good.

Lauren: It was very cute.

Gretchen: I think the stress part – in the technical sense, there’s this very tempting pun with the stress part in the vernacular sense.

Lauren: I think because it’s a sound that is everywhere and ubiquitous but, until you study linguistics, you don’t know that it is all around you. Not only is it around you, but it has its own symbol and it has its own name. I think that’s why it’s a classic linguist iconography to have fun with.

Gretchen: I hope that learning about schwa has not been stressful!

[Music]

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

Gretchen: I can be found at @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes and you wish there were more? You can get access to over 30 bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and other rewards. Recent bonus episodes include synaesthesia, numbers, teaching linguistics, and a robo-generated episode of Lingthusiasm. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you could recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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

#lingthusiasm #language #linguistics #episode 44 #transcripts #podcast #schwa #IPA #International Phonetic Alphabet #stress #merch #never stressed

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dialovers-hell · 5 years

Text

Anonymous said: Could you write a scenario where the Mukami brothers catches their innocent S/O cuddling with a plushie version of them?

A/N: Oh how cute~ ˶⚈Ɛ⚈˵

Ruki - He finds you curled up on his bed holding the stuffed toy close to your chest and chuckles at your childish nature at first, not surprised that you still sleep with plushies. However as he leans closer to identify the creature you have in your arms, his eyes widen in shock which is extremely uncommon with the stone cold vampire. His arms swiftly yank the toy out of your grasp in order to examine in from up close, waking you up in the process.

“Where on earth did you get such a doll that looks identical to me? Or did you happen to make it yourself?”

You blush when you realize what exactly is going on and timidly admit to him that you had it custom made from this woman who makes them online.

“Well either way i am going to get rid of it; there is no need for you to latch on to such a thing.”

You try to pry the toy away from him but before you know it, he has you pinned to the bed with a look in his eyes that you know is going to lead to you being punished...

“Now,” he whispers harshly, “what exactly makes you think that you are able to act in such a way with me?”. His tone is cold but you can sense a hint adrenaline in his words. “Tsk tsk, your behavior is out of line so it looks like i’ll have to do something about that immediately. Must I really train you again?”

He suddenly flips you around so that you’re facing away from him, your stomach pressing into the bed. A cold finger traces along your neck, building up the tension in your body. He suddenly pulls at the collar of your shirt to reveal the skin at the base of your neck. You shiver as he teasingly licks you before stabbing his fangs through your flesh. Training has begun.

Kou - Obviously the first thing you were going to do when the mini-Kou you had ordered online finally arrived is shove it in your boyfriend’s face. He jokingly teases you about how the doll’s shoes don’t match its shirt and how he would never wear his hair parted in such a way. However he quickly changes his excited demeanor and replaces his smile with an iconic pout.

“Ne~ M-neko-chan, why would you buy this? Am i that bad at cuddling or something?” And before you get the chance to answer, he switches his mood on you again and pulls you into a tight embrace, practically squeezing you to death while yelling “Wah, did you really get this so that you don’t miss me as much when I’m on tour?! No, no i know an even better reason why you got it! It’s so that you can use it during naughty time when I’m not there to watch riiiiiiiight?” He purrs.

You immediately shove your hand over his mouth to get him to stop yelling such crude remarks and your face is now a bright shade of beetroot red. Why must he always drive you crazy?

“No! Why would I want to do anything like that anyways? That’s weird. I only got it because it looked like you and it was cute... SO STOP ASSUMING THAT I’M OBSESSED WITH SEX!” you pout, scolding your boyfriend for his racy ideas of what you would do with the innocent doll.

His laughter fills the room and he finally loosens his grip on you. “You know what Neko-chan, you were right about one thing..”

“What exactly might that be?” you reply, curious to know where he was going with this.

“This doll is super cute! Well of course it is, it looks like me after all, but you just gave me the greatest idea for new merchandise to sell to my fans! They are going to love this!! But before we’re going to do any of that we definitely need to do something about the shoes, the hair, the shade of pink, the sparkle in my eye..” and he continues to ramble on and on. Before you know it, you’re helping him to decide whether his eyes are aquamarine or cerulean blue.

Yuma - You had been bored out of your mind all say since your so called “lover” was too busy harvesting the vegetables in his garden since he would “absolutely die if he let those damn birds get to them before he did”. Gee, it sure is nice to know that your boyfriend prioritizes greedy ass birds over you. The room was far too cold for your liking and it only reminded you of how perfect it would be to cuddle with someone right now. After minutes of silently complaining to yourself, you remembered the Yuma plushie that you had hidden away but never really got the chance to use. You ran over to the pile of old clothes in your closet (which you had hidden your soft companion underneath) and had finally gained a suitable cuddle companion. But just when you’ve started to get comfy under a blanket...

“Oi sow, what are you doin’ with that ugly ass doll!” but his eyes widen as he realizes that the features of said ugly doll look a little too familiar. “Um...Sow... why does this doll have my face?”

You burst into laughter at his complete and utter confusion which only earns you another strange glance from him. However you’re silenced when he grabs the doll, briefly walks out of the room, then returns with the plush nowhere to be seen. Your cries of annoyance are immediately silenced by his plopping down on the bed and spooning you.

The both of you remained quiet for a moment until you finally asked, “Yuma, where’s my doll-”

“Shut up”

“But-”

“Nope. Never gonna tell ya.”

“Yumaaaaaaaaaaa”

“Serves ya right for choosing a stinkin’ doll over yer own boyfriend”

“Well last time i checked, you chose a those stinking birds over me!”

“Don’t. You. DARE suggest that I’m friends with those birds! Dontcha have any idea how much pain and sorrow they have brought to me? They have way too much junk in the trunk in my opinion and I would not hesitate to shoot them if I could.” he huffs, clearly irritated by the fat-ass birds that have been apparently tormenting his soul. So after that tearjerker of a comment, you had no other choice then to be content with your current position and just search for the doll some other time.

Azusa - He had walked in to see you cuddling with the stuffed toy, squeezing tightly. At first, your lover was a bit confused as to why you had a doll that looked like him in the first place...

“Eve-san....why do you have....a doll...that looks like me?” he asks, staring at you with no defining look of upset or happiness on his face.

“Well,”, you say, “he reminds me of you and makes me feel better when you’re not around.”

He looks a bit worried and timidly asks you, “Eve-san....do you...love...the doll?”

You respond with a small smile in response to his strange question and state “of course i do”. Yet when you notice the small frown forming at his lips, you realize what he meant by the question and immediately follow up your sentence with “but not more than you though. It’s just a cute reminder of the person that I love most”. You feel relief wash over you when you see that his eyes have brightened up, signalling that he was no longer worried about having to split your affection with the inanimate object.

He joins you on the bed and shuffles as close to you as his body will allow and intertwines his fingers with yours, staring longingly at you with a thoughtful expression on his face.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” you question, wanting to know what could possibly be going on behind those eyes

He smiles softly and caresses your cheek with his free hand. “I was just wondering....maybe...I should get a doll...that looks like you.”

#diabolik #lovers #Diabolik Lovers #Ruki Mukami #Yuma Mukami #Azusa Mukami #Kou Mukami #Mukami

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