So-- there's hasn't been much gladly in recent weeks here at mostgladly.net-- more like "most miserably" and "most weepily." Let's talk about something fun tonight. Let's talk about vowels! It's been years since we've talked about vowels.
Lynne Murphy shared a Twitter link to a Mental Floss article on vowels. This sentence made me say "hmmm": "Depending on the dialect, and including diphthongs, which are combinations of two vowel sounds, English has from nine to 16 vowel sounds." I couldn't imagine a dialect of English with only 9 vowels. The author tweeted a clarification.
@lynneguist @mostgladly Ah confusing wording. Sense is "if you include diphthongs can be up to 16"
— Arika Okrent (@arikaokrent) December 18, 2016
I'm still thinking about the range of possible vowel tallies in English.
English vowels are defined primarily by tongue height (high or low or in between) and tongue position (front or back or in between). If you want to say "eee" as in "see," you'll need to move your tongue forward and lift it up close to your hard palate. Try it and see. To say "ih" as in "sit," keep it in the front of your mouth but move it down a tick. The next notch down gives you "ay" as in "say," the next gives you "eh" as in "set," and the lowest position gives you a short "a" as in "sat." That makes five front vowels, and I'm not acquainted with any American English dialect that omits any of them.
Next let's do a similar thing with your tongue in the back of your mouth: the topmost position gives you "ooo" as in "suit" (if you round your lips); moving downward we get "soot" and "so." Then there's some variability: lots of American English speakers have two low back vowels, because the vowel in "sought" is distinct from the vowel in "sot." Some of you, however, are scratching your heads at the very idea of a difference between those two vowels; they sound like the same vowel to you.
I'm wondering if this is where the lower figure came from: many AmE speakers have five front vowels and only four back vowels. But! But but but! We all have central vowels. Many phonetic systems classify postvocalic "r" as a vowel, sometimes known as a schwar (schwa + r, see?). And every single AmE speaker uses the non-rhotic central vowels, because that's how you say "uh." There is no American English dialect without an "uh," I feel confident. I propose that the barest baldest minimum number for American English vowels would be 10.
I do not find it a very persuasive minimum, however, because it is the minimum for monophthongs and we also have three phonemic diphthongs. In plain English, that means there are three cases in which you have to smush two vowels together into a single entity to produce recognizable English words. "Sigh" is an "ah" plus an "ih"; "soy" is an "aw" plus an "ih"; "sow" (the mama pig kind, not the planting kind -- I am trying to avoid phonetic symbols and feeling the pain) is an "ah" plus the short "oo" in "book." These are not universal -- you've heard Southern US speakers say "Ah see Dr. Pal" where you might say "I see Dr. Powell." But I'm not acquainted with dialects that monophthongize all three of those diphthongs. I don't think you can produce consistently comprehensible American English without 11 vowels (10 monophthongs plus at least one diphthong), no matter what region you hail from.
We've also got two non-phonemic diphthongs. In plain English, that means that most of us employ two additional two-vowel combinations, but you can still understand a speaker who doesn't do so. Omission of the phonemic diphthongs creates perplexity: a person who wants to ask for a toy for Christmas but instead requests a toe is going to garner some funny looks and the occasional Hannibal Lecter comparison. The non-phonemic diphthongs don't cause confusion, but they're an important part of sounding like a native speaker. (On a related note, they are partially responsible for the problems you have sounding like a native speaker in languages that don't use them; see item 3 in the Mental Floss article.) When an American English speaker says "say," there's an "ih" blended in at the end of the word -- it's not like when a Spanish speaker says se using a monophthong. When an American English speaker says "so," there's a short "oo" added on. If you say it aloud I bet you can feel your jaw and tongue and maybe your lips move as the vowel shifts. Again, I don't think there are many American English dialects that omit these diphthongs, so I vote we count them.
Are you with me or you have gone off in search of eggnog recipes? (This one looks yummy, doesn't it? Except it's like the anti-Whole 30 beverage, so no coquito for me this week.) Let's count: five front vowels, five back vowels (or four if you merge sought/sot), two central vowels, three phonemic diphthongs, and two non-phonemic diphthongs, for a total of 17. And I'll just mention that IPA distinguishes between stressed and unstressed "uh" and "er," using different symbols for them. So there's a case to be made for a total of four central vowels: stressed and unstressed "uh," stressed and unstressed "er." (I don't say it's a fabulous case, but I am pushing back against the Danes here with their umpty-zillion vowels. (<-Guess who does not study comparative phonology.)) This would give us 19 vowels, even if two of them are kind of cheaterpants vowels.
And you learned there were only 5. Life is full of surprises, is it not?
Recent Comments