Indiscreet words, Part II: Son of Sounds

Ok, so in my last post about how the speech stream is far from discrete, I talked about how difficult it is to pick apart words. But I didn’t really talk that much about phonemes, and since I promised you phonetics and phonology and phun, I thought I should cover that. Besides, it’s super interesting.

It’s not just that language is continuous, it’s that language that’s discrete is actually impossible to understand. I ran across this Youtube video a while back that’s a great example of this phenomenon.

What the balls of yarn is he saying? It’s actually the preamble to the constitution, but it took me well over half the video to pick up on it, and I spend a dumb amount of time listening to phonemes in isolation.

You probably find this troubling on some level. After all, you’re a literate person, and as a literate person you’re really, really used to thinking about words as being easy to break down into “letter sounds”. If you’ve ever tried to fiddle around with learning Mandarin or Cantonese, you know just how table-flippingly frustrating it is to memorize a writing system where the graphemes (smallest unit of writing, just as morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning, phoneme is the small unit of sound and dormeme is the smallest amount of space you can legally house a person in) have no relation to the series of sounds they represent.

Fun fact: It’s actually pretty easy to learn to speak Mandarin or Cantonese once you get past the tones. They’re syntactically a lot like English, don’t have a lot of fussy agreement markers or grammatical gender and have a pretty small core vocabulary. It’s the characters that will make you tear your hair out.

But. Um. Sorry, got a little off track there. Point was, you’re really used to thinking about words as being further segmented. Like oranges. Each orange is an individual, and then there are neat little segments inside the orange so you don’t get your hands sticky. And, because you’re already familiar with the spelling system of your language, (which is, let’s face it, probably English) you probably have a fond idea that it’s pretty easy to divide words that way. But it’s not. If it were, things like instantaneous computational voice to voice translation would be common.

It’s hard because the edges of our sounds blur together like your aunt’s watercolor painting that you accidently spilled lemonade on. So let’s say you’re saying “round”. Well, for the “n” you’re going to close off your nasal passages and put your tongue against the little ridge right behind your teeth. But wait! That’s where you tongue needs to be to make the “d” sound! To make it super clear, you should stop open up your nasal passages before you flick your tongue down and release that little packet of air that you were storing behind it. You’re totally not going to, though. I mean, your tongue’s already where you need it to be; why would you take the extra time to make sure your nasal passages are fully clear before releasing the “d”? That’s just a waste of time. And if you did it, you’d sound weird. So the “d” gets some of that nasally goodness and neither you or your listener give a flying Fluco.

But, if you’re a computer who’s been told, “If it’s got this nasal sound, it’s an ‘n'”, then you’re going to be super confused. Maybe you’ll be all like, “Um, ok. It kinda sounds like an ‘n’, but then it’s got that little pop of air coming out that I’ve been told to look for with the ‘p’, ‘b’, ‘t’ ‘d’, ‘k’, ‘g’ set… so… let’s go with ‘rounp’. That’s a word, right?” Obviously, this is a vast over-simplification, but you get my point; computers are easily confused by the smearing around of sounds in words. They’re getting better, but humans are still the best.

So just remember: when you’re around the robot overlords, be sure to run your phonemes together as much as possible. It might confuse them enough for you to have time to run away.