4/20/13: In Which Language is Actually Discussed

Yesterday I meant to start a discussion about the nature of language as a whole and got sidetracked talking about high school and how I need to get back to studying Japanese. Tangents aside, language is something that has always fascinated me for many reasons. As such, it's going to be a perennial topic on this blog, albeit not using the literal definition of perennial because heaven knows I can't be bothered to stick to any sort of schedule. I want to take today to throw my half-educated ramblings at you on the topic of the use of vowels in linguistics, and the evolution thereof. As a disclaimer, I'm  not an expert on this topic, but I will try to sound like one sometimes.

Any English speaker, native or otherwise, should be fully aware that we use (or abuse) vowels in creative and often silly ways. For example, in that sentence alone, I used every vowel in the written language in almost every way it's normally used! All that's missing is a basic long O, which you almost have in "or" but the r changes things because in English following any vowel with an r changes things. But this is my point! To someone who didn't speak English, hearing that sentence spoken aloud should conjure a bevy of images with the varied sounds it brings out. Ahs, ees, oos, ehs, ihs, aies, ows, everything is just thrown around and smashed up with a hodge-podge of consonant sounds to make meaning. And yet, by our rules, we only have five (and a half, but I'll get to that) vowels! They just combine and get modified to make every possible sound a human mouth can wrap around. Well, almost. A few other language families figured out some glottal clicks and the like that Indo-European languages never got around to, but I'm ignoring those for the purpose of this. So, accepting all of this, what's the point? English is weird, but isn't every other language just as odd-ball?

Well, in my experience, no. To put it bluntly, English is so bastardized that we've essentially oversimplified ourselves into complication. Spanish, for example, was the first second language I ever studied (and that makes sense grammatically so don't challenge me). In the two years I got through, and the subsequent snippets I've been able to pick up,  I haven't seen a lot of evidence that their vowels get a lot more complicated than what a five-year-old picks up in "donde esta la biblioteca?" O will pretty much always be o, i will always go ee, e will always be eh, and a will always say ah. Oh yeah, u and y are in there as well, and their y only makes one sound from what I saw. I think French gets more complicated, but I'll have to run that by a friend or two who actually studied the language - I never really got a good feel for it. I only know they have a lot more combinations, but even those seem to follow more set patterns than English does. Example: "eaux" in French has always turned out to be "oh" when I've seen it, but "ough" in English is either "ooh" or "uf" or "oh" and it doesn't make a lick of sense. Maybe I'm oversimplifying, and if I am please correct me. I'm here to learn as much - if not more - than anyone who might stumble upon this thing.

Shifting away from Romance languages to my other realm of experience for a moment, I'd like to talk briefly about Japanese. Japanese is a freaking fascinating spirally craptacular dangerfest of a language to learn, but it's beautiful in so many ways. It's why, after (holy crap I'm getting older) six years, I keep coming back to it for another go after it kicks my butt. The Japanese alphabets aren't actually alphabets at all, which, if you know much about the language and culture, is nothing new to you. Instead, they have the hiragana, katakana, and kanji, all different sets of symbols with different purposes. I know about eleven kanji and ten of them are numbers. Those are the Chinese-based symbols that represent entire words and can have multiple pronunciations for each character depending on how they're arranged and they blow my mind so I'm leaving them aside for now. The kana are what I'm decent with, and that's the closest the Japanese have to an alphabet*. Each of their symbols in the kana represents a sound (like "ah, ka, chi, toh, ru, he," etc.), and the kana they draw from depends on whether the word they're spelling out is native Japanese or not. For example, "te-re-bi" would be in katakana, because it's derived from the English word "television," but "ya-ki-so-ba" would be hiragana because the name of the noodles is actually Japanese. Now that the little lesson is over, back to the point!

Japanese vowels are always - repeat, ALWAYS - pronounced as they are seen. Even in combination, if they appear in an "aeo" or whatever, you say each one in succession. Granted, a native or fluent speaker will be able to blend them together enough that an amateur like myself will take pause with it, but each sound is distinctly there. Let's use a (somewhat) well-known figure as our example, the head of Disney-associated Studio Ghibli Hayao Miyazaki. Though you'll often hear his name pronounced "Hi-ow" the more proper pronunciation is simply "ha-ya-o". All that's happening is the sounds are being pulled together for convenience, but every a is ah, every o is oh, and no y will ever make a vowel sound on its own (unless someone really fails at romaji, but that's another story).

So... This was a long and winding post, and I do believe I said something about "another story" or "getting to that" a few times and then left those hanging. I'll probably continue to do that for a while. Peace out!