Informal abbreviations

There are plenty of informal abbreviations, or shortenings of words out there. We don't really think about these that much in everyday life, but do you consider that they can be harmful to the English language?

Here are some examples and their meanings:

diff - as in "What's the diff?" - difference
Analysis: 1 syllable saved

refi - as in "Refi now!" - refinance
Analysis: 2 syllables saved

Notice we are dealing strictly with spoken word, not written. Abbreviations like i.e, etc., are perfectly acceptable.

These abbreviations would not be appropriate in a formal setting such as a meeting. Similar to verbification that was discuss in the previous post, these kinds of informal abbreviations demonstrate that we can get lazy over language. These abbreviations should only be used colloquially and hopefully never become actual words.

Verbifying things

Have you noticed that more and more words, which are usually nouns, are suddenly turning into verbs? This is the act of verbification: the creation of verbs from words that are normally other parts of speech.

Practically everyone says "google this" when they actually mean to use the Google search engine to find something.

It's often used in marketing speak, as in: "This will impact sales next year." The more correct way to say it would be "This will have an impact on sales next year." since impact is originally a noun and using it as a verb sounds awkward.

More examples of verbification:

"Do you Sudoku?"
"Let's all {insert product name here}!"

Verbification can be thought of as lazy, as it takes fewer words to get your point across. It's often better to use a different word altogether and avoid the awkward phrasing. In the above example, the word influence could be used instead of impact.

Made-up languages, part 1

How many of you have actually made up a language, even during early childhood? Here are two basic examples of such languages.

Op-talk: Insert the letters "op" after each consonant in the word, and leave the vowels alone. Example: yes -> yop-e-sop

Gibberish: Insert "udda-g" after the first consonant in each syllable of the word. Example: yes -> yudda-ges

Why invent a language?

A reason to use an invented language would be to keep those without "expert" knowledge out of the topic of conversation. Say for example, if you and a friend wanted to talk about a forbidden subject, you could use "op-talk" (assuming none of the others around you knew about it!) to communicate. Of course, the aforementioned examples aren't too difficult to crack, and thus one might move onto something more complex.

Spelling vs. pronunciation

A common complaint relating to the English language is that a lot of words are not spelled the way they are sound. Should all words be spelled like they are pronounced? I'm sure that in elementary school you once complained that spelling is too chaotic, and that the word school should be spelled skool, and through be made into thru.

The reason for this chaos is that in writing, a particular letter can have more than one sound associated with it, depending on the context (its surrounding letters for instance). A good example of this is the letter "C": it can represent either a [k] sound or an [s] sound. Furthermore, some sounds in English are not represented with a single letter, and we must use two letters to write them. The [sh] sound in shout is an example of this.

There are many arguments for keeping English spelling as it is. Reading comprehension will suffer if all words are spelled exactly as they are sounded. Many words change their pronunciation when inflected forms of the word are used. Consider what a mess it would be to read musical as muzikal and musician as muzishan. Also, there can be stress changes on different forms of the same word, like photograph and photographer.

English spelling, although many find it tricky, should be kept as it is. Proponents of "English spelling reform" have been somewhat successful, as we sometimes see signs that say "nite", "thru", and more rarely "foto".

Phonetics: Why we say 'cheese'

Phonetics is defined as the study of sounds made in the production of human languages. It is important to note that sounds and spellings of the English language are quite different. Not all English words are spelled the way they are sounded. Words such as "through" and "night" have more letters in them than sounds. Spelling vs. sound will be brought up again, for now I want to concentrate on the basics of phonetics.

As human beings, we produce sounds using our vocal tract. Where we make the sound (known as the place of articulation) matters. For instance, the [p] and [b] sounds use the lips. I won't bore you with a full list of the locations of each of the sounds, but I'll present an interesting factoid.

When pronouncing the long E vowel sound (IPA symbol [i]), which occurs in words such as "seat" and "meet", the relative position of the tongue is toward the front of the mouth. Furthermore, the lips are not rounded when pronouncing this sound (unlike the [o] sound in "go" which causes the lips to be round). Thus, when you say "cheese", it forces your mouth to be in a position which kind of looks like you are smiling.

Phonetics has even more uses than you might think. Ever think about why your dentist tells you to open your mouth and say "ahhhh"? This is because the "ah" sound is pronounced with the tongue in the back of the mouth, thus preventing your tongue from getting in the way of the dentist's work!

What Is Linguistics?

Linguistics is, according to Merriam-Webster, "the study of human speech including the units, nature, structure, and modification of language." It is important to note that linguistics deals with the analysis of any language, not just English.

A lot of ground is covered in linguistics. Some topics include: the evolution of language, how do languages differ from each other, the structure of human languages, dialects, speech acts, pronunciation, historical linguistics, and even informal topics like "made-up" languages, puns, and how the internet has influenced our language.

In the next few entries, I will talk about the sounds that make up language (phonetics), what certain letter combinations are allowed in the English language and how that compares to other languages.

Why Linguistics?

One of the questions you may ask is why study linguistics?

Linguistics deals with how to analyze any human language, thus making it an interesting subject. One doesn't necessarily need to speak any language other than English to understand linguistics. It is not as narrow as one might think, there are plenty of applications of linguistics that are useful in everyday life. Like I mentioned earlier, it does not necessarily have to be a technical topic at all. I will focus on using terms that most people can understand, and if a technical term does pop up, I will explain it fully.