Linguistics Monster
(An e-mail to my Linguistics Professor and her aide)
Dear Linguists,
Alright, but now that my mind is opened, how do I close it again?
My friend John Blackburn and I were chatting, and he tried to say, “unmanaged code” (talking about computer software) and it came out sounding like “unmanaged goat”, and I couldn’t stop myself from thinking, “Sure, [k] and [g] are both velar stops, and yep, that’s an assimilation error: the voiced [d] ending ‘unmanaged’ influenced the unvoiced [k] beginning ‘code’ to become voiced. As for the alveolar stops which were swapped at the end, I don’t know why the last [d] in ‘code’ decided that it wanted to flip over to become its unvoiced partner; that might be a listening error on my part.”
YOU did this to me!
Seriously, though, I am having such fun listening to speech for phonological transforms. There’s virtually nothing as cool as understanding why stuff happens.
-Tom
Tom Chappell wrote:
My professor wrote back:
“Try this instead: the voicing values of [k]…[d] are reversed to>> [g]…[t]. In other words, the phones remain the same except for voicing +/-. Neat, eh? I had a professor at UCLA (she has since passed away) who made her life’s work out of just such speech errors. Her publications are many, and you should find some of them, as I know you’d love reading more. Her name was Victoria Fromkin. All of us were responsible for collecting data for her. It was a crazed time!”
Posted 06 Jun 2004 at 12:02 am ¶