Oh, What a Mouth Can Do.

The human mouth is an impressive machine. In addition to allowing us to breathe, bite, chew, swallow, lick, kiss, and whatever else you use it for, it grants us the ability to speak. This process of speaking, making sequences of sounds that carry discrete (individual) and combinatorial meaning, gives birth to humanity’s most unique, personal, and social innovation: language.

The language that you speak and the language that I speak are different. If you can read this right now, then you probably speak English, that much we can agree on. But, who’s to say what English really is? The English themselves? The Americans? The South Africans? The Belizeans? And I’m not just splitting hairs or playing Descartes here. My English is undoubtedly different then your English. How? Well, let’s start somewhere simple. What do you call a sweet, carbonated beverage? Soda, pop, soda pop, a soft drink? There are different ways to speak of the same object or idea, and chances are you favor one over the others.

To make things more complicated, you might have words that you use and know that I don’t, and vice versa. There are words so archaic, they might never get used outside of the sentence, “Did you know ____ is a word?” At the same time, new words are created and used everyday and they aren’t in Merriam Webster’s book. In these past few months, COVID-19 alone has led to hundreds of new words and phrases. And on a phonetic note, when you say the word, economics, do you say the “e” like the “ea” in eat, or like the “e” in get? Both are acceptable, but you most likely use one more than the other. What about the word neither? Neether, nyther, which is correct? Well, neither. You’ve heard of dialects and accents, and that’s a way to explain it.

But, that’s not all. Consider the word vlog, a portmanteau of the words “video” and “blog.” Is this an English word? Some would say yes, some would say no. If you vouch for its wordiness, why? What other English word starts with “vl,” (besides a certain brand of pickles or Putin’s first name)? You’ll find that none do. So then, why accept vlog as English? Because it’s useful?

What if I told you that I made up a new word, vlarge. It means “very large” and I think it is quite useful. I can see a “V” on the tags of t-shirts all over the world, right next to “S,” “M,” and “L” on the racks. No need anymore for that pesky, two-lettered “XL,” am I right? After all, ink is expensive; Big T-Shirt might save a couple bucks by cutting back a letter.

Maybe I convinced you. Probably not. And why? Because it’s weird! It doesn’t sound right. It’s instinctive to give vlarge the boot, and it is this instinct that shapes a huge amount of our language. As speakers of English, we can probably recognize that vlarge does not sound English. And for most of us, it would not be a particularly useful addition to the English lexicon, just as vlog probably wasn’t at its conception. But, if a group of garment workers decided that to use the word vlarge in place of “extra large” was more beneficial to them and this spread to workers across English-speaking nations and then outside of them, maybe it would catch on, and maybe, like vlog, most people would forget that it’s not so English-sounding. Speaking a language is all about association, between sounds, syllables, words, phrases, etc. While we might disagree on what to call the room where we relieve ourselves (bathroom, restroom, powder-room, wash-closet, toilet, loo), we are more likely to agree on words that are wrong, unacceptable, and ungrammatical, vlarge being one of them. Even so, it isn’t so simple; language rarely is.

The vlog paradox speaks to a quality of phonology called phonotactic constraints. This is the idea that there are sound combinations that are more difficult than others to pronounce and perceive. A basic example of this is consonant clusters. A single consonant followed or preceded by a vowel is simpler for us to hear and say than a double, or triple, or quadruple consonant is. Take the word say. It is simpler for us to say than slay, which is easier to say than splay. There is a reason I say “simpler” and not “easier.” As English speakers, we have been trained to hear and pronounce these clusters of sounds, because long ago a group of speakers decided that it was more beneficial to the language to have consonant clusters. Imagine how fewer words English would have if we didn’t allow ourselves to use clusters. I can count more than thirty in this paragraph alone. In fact, English uses some of the longest consonant clusters out of any language on the planet. Say the word angst out loud. Or sixths. Or strengths. These quadruple consonant clusters are very rare outside of languages like English or Russian.

Of course, just because we do have consonant clusters doesn’t mean that we can use any consonant cluster we can think of. We know that the word spring is acceptable and not shpring. We know that clay is a word, but something like hlay would furrow our brows instantly. We know that pray works nicely, but someone claiming the existence of mray or nray would make us cringe. But these cluster constraints are unique to each language. The “N” sound is the first person pronoun in many African languages. Something like njarabi could never be English, but it means “I fall in love” in Bambara.

Yet, many languages don’t use consonant clusters at all. Japanese is a great example. Take the word English. In Japanese, it is “Eigo,” simplifying a triple consonant down to one. When a Japanese speaker would rather preserve sounds than delete them, they add a vowel in between clusters. It is for this reason that McDonald’s is pronounced closer to “Makudonarudo.” Baseball, an American sport that has become very popular in Japan, is pronounced “besubaru,” and a strike is “sutoraiku.”

Phonotactic constraints need to be bypassed because it is what we require in order to communicate effectively, especially in the modern world. If our languages were as simple as possible, we would run out of words pretty quickly. They allow us to use bigger and more descriptive words and generate new ones, like vlog, with ease; however, the way that each language goes through this process is different. Japanese uses vowel length to distinguish different words. The word for building and beer are the same except for the length of the vowel. Other languages make use of tones, speaking at different pitches, and this alone changes a word’s meaning. It is what makes learning a second language so difficult: you have to acquire a new set of instincts that allow you to understand what the language accepts and how it deals with words that break these rules.

It makes you wonder what types of constraints are still out there, waiting to get broken by ambitious future languages…