Reverie Five: sound and fury

I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow to toss one of these up. Surprise! If you haven’t gleaned it from the nearly-three years I’ve been blogging, I’m a linguist by trade (or at least, I sunlight as one), and lately I’ve been really into phonology. Each of the branches of the field has its own charm for me, and they come and go in my interest; this week it happens to be sound. So what better thing to do than spin it into a prompt?

This week: “sound and fury“

I’m going to start with a caveat and an apology: this is going to be much easier for the English speakers in the mix, and even more so for the ones who don’t speak a particularly rare dialect. But for you non-English speakers, I’ll make it up to you at the end.

Mini-linguistics lesson. There are 40-odd sounds in English, depending on whom you ask, which (as noted by poets, wits, and despairing students throughout history) are often mis-represented in the 26-letter alphabet. The consonants are generally more consistent than the vowels (with the glaring exception of “R”) from dialect to dialect, so we’ll start with those. I’m going to use IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) notation, which I hope will show up as occasionally-funny-looking symbols between the [brackets] below:

- [b] (as in bob), [p] (as in pop), [d] (as in dad), [t] (as in toot), [g] (as in gig], and [k] (as in kick) are the stops, which stop(!) the airflow entirely, though briefly. There is also the glottal stop, [ʔ], often given in the example “uh-oh”: it’s the pause in the middle, a silent stop.
- The fricatives make the airflow turbulent and hissy: these include  [f] (fat), [v] (vat), [θ] (think), [ð] (these), [h] (hat), and [x] if you’re Scottish (loch). A subset of these are the sibilants: [s] (sat), [z] (zing), [ʃ] (shoe) and [ʒ] as the “s” in treasure. When you put a stop and a fricative together, you get an affricate, which in English includes [tʃ] (chain) and [dʒ] (Jane). Debatably, you could say [ts] (as in fits) is too.
- The nasals are fun because they have [m] (mom), the only letter you can make with your mouth closed, as well as [n] (nun) and [ŋ] (wing), also called “engma”. It’s an enigma why it’s called engma.
- We also have the semi-vowels [j] (which, despite its shape, represents “y” as in you) and [w] (we), the lateral or liquid [l] (which can sometimes be “clear” as in “lean” or “dark” as in “Lord!”), and the rhotic [ɹ] (as in run, however you pronounce it).
- [l], [m], and [n] can all be syllabic, as in the last syllables of “riddle”, “rhythm” and “rotten”, which means they function as vowels. R does this too, but we’ll get to that.

As for the vowels, you have to bear with my dialectal take on them; I will bet money some of you pronounce these totally differently. There’s the “close” vowels [i] (weeds), [ɪ] (sit), [u] (food), and [ʊ] (good); the “mid” range ones [e] (bay), [ɛ] (get), [o] (flow), and [ɔ] (flaw); and then the “open” ones [æ] (cat), [ʌ] (cut) and [a] (father). It gets hairier: some dialects merge some of these together, some divide a few (like [ɑ] and [ɒ], deeper [a]‘s if you’re British), and some add a few entirely (like [y], the “French u” that you hear in some British dialects for “tune” and “dune”).

On top of that, a combination of two vowels is a diphthong, of which I’m only going to put three to keep it simple: [aw] as in loud, [ai] as in lied, and [oi] as in oils. Finally, there is the matter of the schwa, the unstressed [ə] in weak syllables (such as in “syllables”). This can also become rhotic, [ɚ] as in girl: this is the “syllabic R”. Everybody pronounces it differently, and some people don’t pronounce it all.

And what is the point of all this pedantry? Well, in a take-off on the classic abecedarian or pangram where you have to use every letter in the alphabet, your challenge here is to write what I’ll call a “panophone“, which I’m sure has been used elsewhere before: write a poem, as short as possible, using every sound in the language. I say as short as possible, but obviously not so short that you sacrifice some of what you want to say. So, not using the [x], counting the syllabics and affricates as separate sounds, keeping only one [a] but using the rhotic schwa, I’ve got 44 to use total. So here we go:

We read Under Milkwood to each other
as snowfall changed the park to buried treasure:
language became a hidden shape. So did love,
and sighs, and the crawling prism of time.
A thousand years later, we grew boyish hands again:
little by little, to dig up, bow out, and admire.

(I put those two words in red because they have a “tense-ash” sound, which is my dialect; the “a” in these words has a nasal, twangy quality. I used that instead of the glottal stop, so I kind of cheated. But “bow out”, with that gap in the middle, almost works. Notice also: no Q, no J, no X, no Z. This isn’t Scrabble.)

So that’s the simplest version of this challenge. But as always, here are a couple of developmental options:

- Add sounds unique to your dialect (and cut out the ones you don’t use), like I did above. The linguistic description I gave is a gross over-simplification of what makes up a dialect: I recommend checking out this Wikipedia page on the subject and reading out loud to see what adjustments you ought to make.
- Try this in another language if you can: Wikipedia, once again, has plenty of pages on the phonology of other languages, and gives a full complement of sounds for every one I can imagine a reader of this blog speaking. I’m thinking particularly of people whose names rhyme with “Bolivian”.
- Alliteration and assonance are your friends, too. Pick one sound and use it liberally, but only in one phrase or line; you may be surprised at the symbolism you create by doing this (a line full of [l] lilts and lifts, while a phrase full of [f]‘s fizzes fitfully). Then, don’t use it anywhere else in the poem, to draw attention to that line, if you want.

Happy writing! Curious to see what you all come up with…