What words are easy to say?

Ok, so in the last couple posts I’ve been throwing around terms like “easy to say” without giving a whole lot of explanation. And that’s a pity, because the study of what words are “easy” and what words are “hard” is, in my opinion, one of the greatest sub-disciplines in linguistics: phonotactics.

Phonotactics is like your great-aunt who always arranges the seating at family reunions becuase she remembers who fought with whom twenty years ago and knows not to sit them together. Basically, some sounds really like to be next to others. Like vowels. Vowels like to be next to everyone. In Japanese, for example, with a couple of exceptions, most syllables have to be made of a consonant plus a vowel. (In ling speak, this is known as “CV”. C for consonant, V for vowel. Yeah, unlike physicists, we like to keep things simple.) What’s even more amazing is that within six months of birth, Japanese infants prefer sounds that are CVCV to those that are CVCCV or CVCVC.

Polish, on the other hand, notoriously plays fast and loose with syllable structure. You can have consonant clusters up to five sounds long in Polish that, most weirdly, don’t follow the same sorts of rules that other languages do. Like English. English can have pretty big consonant clusters… but they’ll only get really big if the first or last sound in the word is ‘s’. (Protip: That’s why ‘s’ is such a great letter in scrabble; there’s a bunch of things you can slap it on to piggyback of someone else’s word, even outside of its morpheme status.) If you’ve ever stumbled over a Polish last name, there’s a sound linguistic reason you found it hard.

Why is this useful? Well, besides its obvious use in language teaching and being great cocktail party conversation material,  if you want to make a plausibly difficult-to-pronounce alien language, screw up your phonotactics and you’ll leave audio book readers in tears.