How can nonsense words sound like English?
Hi, everyone!
It’s fall, the leaves are turning, and the long dark is approaching all too quickly.
News
The big news is that you can now preorder Amplitudes, which contains the first short story I’ve translated, Aiki Mira’s “Schritt ins Leere/A Step into Emptiness.” It’s coming out in May, according to Random Penguin.
Filling Your Worlds With Words, my Kickstarter book, is so close to finished. I’m learning how to use Affinity Publisher to lay out the PDF that’ll go to the printers and as a digital reward to backers. Then I’ll have to figure out how to make Pages give me an epub and make that readable in Kobo, Kindle, and Google Play, because Scrivener’s output is kind of a mess. I’m waiting on a couple illustrations and the final cover art. (Which means I need to figure out what’s going on the back cover… ugh.) I plan to have it available for sale from all the usual places early next year, so if you missed the Kickstarter, you’ll still be able to get it.
Prisencolinensinainciusol and prosody
I was stuck on a topic for this month, so I asked for suggestions in a Discord server and got a few things to add to my ideas folder. The one I’m going to talk about this month is prosody.
What is prosody?
As writers, we’re pretty familiar with the concept of prosody, and, though poets are much more conscious of it, prose writers use it, too. It’s the rhythm of the sentence, the way the it flows from word to word. Longer sentences and polysyllabic words let you relax more into the descriptions of setting or emotions. Short words and short sentences add tension. These are ideas that are pretty familiar to us, both from our own writing and from reading.
We also learned about prosodic feet (iambs, trochees, and all that) and meter in school, and I was taught (as were probably a bunch of you) that Shakespeare’s chosen meter, iambic pentameter, is pretty much the way English prosody works. It’s not perfect, of course, but for a class of teenagers, it’s a good enough approximation.
In linguistics, prosody is basically the same: it’s the timing, rhythm, and stress of speech. But, naturally, it’s a lot more complicated than that, because you start getting into acoustics (fundamental frequency, overtones, all that physics stuff that makes my head hurt) on top of the auditory aspects like loudness and pitch (which are both also, technically, physics). Then there’s phonology and things like the part of speech changing the stress of the word (a CONvert vs. to conVERT).
But different languages have different prosodic features. English and German have very similar prosody, and it’s different from Spanish prosody, and they’re all different from Japanese prosody. There are several theories about the timing of speech, which are (of course) controversial, but what I learned is that English and German are stress-timed languages, and Spanish is syllable-timed. This means that in English and German, the accented (or stressed) syllable is longer than an unaccented syllable, which pretty much seems to hold up, right? A syllable-timed language has approximately equal syllable lengths, whether stressed or unstressed, although this has been difficult to prove.
It sounds like English
In 1972, an Italian singer made a song that sounds like a type of US English but is entirely composed of nonsense. You can watch it here on YouTube and read a little about it on NPR. It’s very strange to listen to. Celentano understands what English sounds like — its prosody and what phonemes are allowed — but the song has no words in it (aside from a few “babe”s and “alright”s). Language Log discussed several nonsense languages, being “committed to taxonomies of nonsense that are as elaborate as possible.” (Unfortunately, the post is old enough to have a Flash embedded audio player, so that section doesn’t work.)
But why does it sound like English?
Because we have linguistic knowledge, and we know what the languages we speak sound like. There’s data from child language acquisition studies about infants and toddlers paying more attention to nonsense words that sound like the language(s) their caregivers speak than ones that don’t. This suggests that there’s some cognitive process that recognizes these patterns and builds off of them. For more on this, textbooks like Erika Hoff’s Language Development (Wadsworth Cengage) are a good place to start.
Characteristics of language
What specifically makes it sound like English, though, and not like German or French or Celentano’s native Italian? Partly it’s the accent he’s putting on. Celentano sounds like he’s riffing on Elvis, and the way he forms his vowels sounds more or less convincingly Elvis-like, which could prime the listener to expect US English. And if you listen, his selection of vowel sounds includes some monophthongized [ai] (as in I if you’re Southern) and the [æ] vowel of cat.
People tend to associate different regional accents primarily with vowels. People from Bahston pahk the cah, and people from Georgia go to see the fahrworks on the fourth of Julah. Vowels are salient for most people, which means they’re very noticeable. Vowels are the core of a syllable and generally take up more time than the consonants, so we pay more attention to them, and it’s logical that they’re what we notice when we encounter somebody with an accent. Consonants can also be part of an accent. The “American R” is one of the first things people from outside the US comment on, because it’s so salient and weird. This very distinctive R makes a few appearances in the song.
The next thing that plays a role in sounding like English is, as you may have already guessed from the topic of this essay, prosody. The longer stressed vowels and shorter unstressed vowels in the song sound natural enough to give it that English feel. Unstressed vowels in English tend to be reduced, which often in practice means that they now sound like schwa (the second vowel in gotta, for example). English not only reduces unstressed syllables in an individual word, but it also reduces the vowel in unstressed words in a sentence.
Take the previous sentence, for example. Reduces is pronounced more like ruhDOOcis, not reeDOOcehs like you might expect from the spelling. The indefinite article a is a whole word; it’s not stressed — in fact, it’s almost never stressed — and it’s reduced to uh. (If we’re emphasizing the indefinite article, as in I would like A piece of paper, meaning one singular piece of paper, we stress it and don’t reduce it.)
The right prosody is what makes a language sound natural, and this video of a Chinese English teacher giving his students tips to achieve a more natural prosody is a good example of that.
The third and last thing I want to mention in why this song sounds like English is the set of phonemes that are used. Every language has a set of phonemes that make up their words. English has around a dozen vowels and 2 dozen consonants. (Don’t believe what the alphabet or your elementary school teacher told you.) Of the 2 dozen consonants, some of them are allowed to cluster together and make new sounds. Sometimes they’re allowed to cluster anywhere in the syllable; sometimes they’re only allowed at the end of the syllable.
Part of the linguistic knowledge I mentioned earlier includes knowing what phonemes occur in your language and what clusters are allowed to form (and where), which allows you to determine whether a new word (real or nonsense) is a word that could logically appear in your language. English words can start with pl- like plink, bl- like blink, fl- like flick. But we don’t (or didn’t until recently) have any that started with vl- outside of words from other languages (e.g., names like Vladimir). But because we have the voiceless/voiced pair of plink and blink, it’s possible to add the voiced half of the flick pair, though vlick isn’t a word. When YouTube started taking off, the people who made video blogs were called vloggers, which is an unusual way for an English word to start, but it’s not absolutely forbidden, like starting a word with 2 stops, like bg-, gd-, tk-, etc.
In the song, Celentano uses (as far as I can tell) only phonemes that exist in English.
In summary
Two of the most noticeable features of a language are its prosody and the sounds that belong to it. An additional feature people notice when other people speak is their accent. Celentano used these noticeable features of English to create a song that sounds like English without containing any real English words (other than some “babe”s and the like).
Application to writing
This is one of the harder things to apply to writing as such, because so much of it is auditory. We can think about sentence rhythm when we write, and maybe some characters’ voices have different prosody because of where they come from or what their native language is.
Book rec
One of the major downsides of doing the majority of my reading as ebooks these days is that I buy or pre-order books and kinda forget about them, which means I periodically sort my books by “oldest” and start with one of those. Most recently, I learned that I bought Warrior of the Wind when it came out, and it’d been sitting in my e-reader app for over a year, forgotten. I was pretty stoked to find it, because I’d just been thinking, “Hey, did the sequel to Son of the Storm come out yet? I should buy it.”
These are the first 2 entries in Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Nameless Republic trilogy (the 3rd is in progress). A young scholar from a low caste whose excellent memory gains him a spot at the university reads a book he isn’t supposed to and learns about magic (and some political stuff) he isn’t supposed to know about, then he encounters someone who can use this secret/forbidden magic, and he ends up on the run from the empire. Book 2 ends on a major cliffhanger, and I am eagerly awaiting the conclusion. The politics are conniving; the characters all have their own conflicting agendas. If you liked CL Clark’s The Unbroken, you should definitely check this out.
Tying it into my usual niche, the characters and society are multilingual, and there are several different Commons, and not all characters can speak all of them. It felt very natural and like it reflected a multilingual reality.
Until next time!
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