During a bout of insomnia, I pondered an underrepresented phoneme. I first learned about these essential quanta of spoken words while I was earning my degree in psychology back in the early 1980’s, and researching computer speech synthesis for fun. What popped into my head these wee hours was the word, “vacuum”.
Say it aloud with me, “Vacuum”. Listen to yourself say it. Vacuum.
Break it down. It starts with the vee, a vocalized eff. Then “a” as in “can”. And a full-stop kay. No surprises, so far.
Did you just utter “Ee”? As in “Keep”? We will get back to that.
Next it depends on your dialect. Maybe you said “oo” as in “broom”, or maybe oo-uh as in “you-uns”. And end with a nice vocalized “mm”. This is the only case that I can think of where a double-U really is.
But, what was that in the middle? Ee? Vakeeoom?
Part of the institutional mis-education in our country is that even teachers are unaware of a double standard in teaching the relationship between spoken and written English. We have “silent-E” drilled into us…
(Digression for mathematician Tom Lehrer’s version on The Electric Company)
… but what about all those hidden, non-silent “E”s? They are everywhere in our spoken words, but not in the written ones. Even many words with silent E have unwritten spoken long-E’s embedded.
Take “lake”, for example. Listen to yourself say it. There is no hint of the written E on the end. But in the middle? L-eh-ee-k. Long “A” is really short-E-long-E. Always. (Ah-l-oo-eh-ee-z)
Take a cue from “cue”. K-ee-oo. Do you, like, like “like”? L-ah-ee-k?
So my obscure title simply means that I mean to bring attention to the essential idea of a troublesome yet common (mean, mean) spoken sound. I’m usually easy to amuse, but sleep deprivation stunts my self-censorship.
Until I moved to St. Louis, I had no idea my first name was pronounced Jee-yann. On the East Coast, where I learned my first conscious phonemes, it sounded more like Chan (a silent H?).
To make that Midwest "ee-yaa" sound the lips pull back more between the consonant and vowel. For the East Coast "Jan," you just drop the jaw.
In the Symphony Chorus our director (from NYC originally) is always getting the "ee-yaa" out of Latin and English dipthongs.
Dan, that reminds me of the late 70's at Tennessee Tech, when the EE dept had a DGS Bytemaster computer equipped with a Votrax speech synthesizer card.
The votrax was an early speech I/O adapter and the output was phoneme based. The micro computer club members took turns playing with it.
It took me a couple of hours to get it to say "America needs you Harry Truman, Yowsah Yowsah Yowsah", ( part of a joke on a friend). Another student had it speaking Farsi quite clearly.
One of the grad students used the Votrax in an elaborate gag on a club member. He had patched a speech routine into a copy of the BASIC intrepreter for the DGS. An unsuspecting student spent several hours typing in a program and testing it before typing the "Save" command.
When he did save the program, he was surprized by a little robotic sounding voice from the computer that said:
"I have worked hard today and am very tired. If you want to save your program, you can save it yourself. You think that because I'm a computer, that I have nothing better to do than what ever you tell me. Well, I'm not doing it. So There!"
Fortunately the grad student, was on hand to show him how to get past the gag routine.