Linguistics

When it comes to the spoken word, clarity is indispensable. You can’t give it out. Some might say indisposable. I looked it up – indisposable is not a word. So the longer you consider indisposable and indispensable, the more you miss how folks are trying to confuse you.

Let’s back up. By clarity, I mean the ease of someone else glomming on to what you say. Each of us has a limited number of neurons to process sounds into speech. Like some evil Star Trek computer that can be tricked into inaction by trying to divide by zero, brain power gets used up by trying to puzzle out mush-mouth speech. Too few neurons will be left for thinking about the meaning of the words.

One of the reasons American English is becoming the Esperanto of our day is because everybody can understand those words we yell at them. Despite their unappealing aesthetics, our hard, clipped consonants are easy to hear. Singers in English emphasize those consonants lest the words become lost in the music. There's little that Italian and French singers can do to make their words understandable, so songs in those languages (especially operatic arias!) are full of banal lyrics repeated twenty or thirty times until everybody gets them. In any language, an effective orator carefully chooses words that are easiest to hear, even if we have no idea what he's talking about - like hope and change.

Mandarin Chinese also is fairly easy on the ear. It emphasizes clear consonants. Some would say the sing-songy nature of the language detracts from its clarity. Maybe the Chinese people just don't want to sound like French opera. Regardless, the pitch in which a vowel is said actually makes a word more understandable. And hilarity ensues when two different words sound the same except for the pitch in which you say them.

Not all dialects of English preserve the good points of the language. Some British speakers, especially the ones hired by National Public Radio to read the news to Americans, favor the soft consonants of French. Not every Brit is that way, mostly the Scots and Eliza Doolittle. And so before going on the air, each news reader attends a special class to reverse the effects of Henry Higginism. I go to sleep listening to the BBC news on NPR - by the time I figure out what they say, my brain has no neurons left to mull over the thoughts that would have kept me awake.

People in the American region of New England reduce all their vowels to a single "ah" sound. That makes it difficult for the rest of us to distinguish their words. New Englanders often claim that we understanding-impaired Americans are a little dim. We say they don't know how to enunciate. Their obstreperousness is the problem. About the time we figure out their words, they've given up on us and have moved on to a new topic. But when they reciprocate by not understanding us, we speak slowly and enunciate carefully and yell a lot. Just thinking about New Englanders causes me to use ill-defined words in choppy sentences.

What I'm saying is obvious, yet is contrary to common sense. The obvious part is that when we speak plainly and loudly, most folks will understand our meaning. But it's not very common sensical to the few of us who have been kicked in the groin after asking for a glass of water - we think that careful enunciation may not really matter. And if kicked by a New Englander, we may believe that enunciation is counter-productive. Perhaps we best understand the sounds that we are used to. Maybe. All I can tell you is this: after spending a week in Boston, I could make out every word that was spoken. I just wish that I had understood what they were saying.