Apple Juice and Double Cheeseburgers

Time to order Adam’s Happy Meal. I leaned my head out the car window and spoke:

I’d like a chicken nugget Happy Meal, with fries and apple juice.

The voice of the order taker came back:

That’s a chicken nugget Happy Meal, fries and a double cheeseburger?

Wha–? Where did the double cheeseburger come from? I responded: “No, apple juice.”

The voice: “A double cheeseburger and apple juice?”

Now Doug and Adam started cracking up in the back seat, because I was getting a taste of my own medicine.

At the Zoo

Doug has been spending his days this week in a day camp at the Columbus Zoological Garden, and while he’s been there, Adam and I have been entertaining ourselves at the zoo and its adjacent waterpark. Here are some linguistic items that have caught my attention in the course of doing that.

First, here’s something Adam and I heard while we were waiting in line for the Cyclone, a waterslide that uses inner tubes that will seat four people. (Digression: Funny we still call them inner tubes. Of course, water parks have never used actual inner tubes for their slides, but when the tube is like two or four inner tubes fused together, the name seems especially inapt.) In front of us were four girls in their early teens. As they contemplated the 55-foot drop in the slide, and wondered which of them would end up sliding down backwards, one girl said that she thought she might “hurl.” They discussed how this might bear on where she sat in the tube; Hurl Girl asked one of the others:

Do you want hurl on you?

Well, why not? The verbs vomit, throw(-)up, and barf all work as nouns, so why shouldn’t the more recent verb of regurgitation hurl be allowed to do it, too? All the same, it was new to me, and sounded funny. Are there other synonyms for the verbs vomit that can’t be used as nouns? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that there was a puddle of ralph on the floor. And of course, verb phrase idioms don’t lend themselves well to turning into nouns — I don’t think English speakers would say He got {toss-his-cookies, worship-the-porcelain-urn, lose-his-lunch} all over his shirt. Do you?

A while back, I wrote about how as a child I was confused by my mom’s two-syllable pronunciation of striped, and one day decided I would henceforth use the one-syllable pronunciation /straIpt/ (to rhyme with griped and sniped) because I just couldn’t see any reason why striped shouldn’t pattern with other words that added an -ed suffix to a word. I never made similar adjustments for words like wicked, naked, or crooked, maybe because I didn’t perceive wick, nake, or crook as words unto themselves. (Or maybe not, since I certainly knew the word rag, but still pronounce the adjective ragged with two syllables.) I was suddenly reminded of these words as Adam and I attended “Raptorama,” a lecture on various birds of prey. As the docent pointed out the red-tailed hawk’s hunting adaptations, he referred several times to its “crooked beak”, pronouncing crooked as /krʊkt/, to rhyme with booked and cooked. Or, now that I think about it, hooked. It could be that he was saying hooked beak, which would make more sense, but it sure sounded like crooked. I pronounce the past tense of the verb crook that way, as in “He crooked a finger at me,” but not the adjective crooked. What about you?

I also noticed that he consistently pronounced talon as /’tælɘn/ to rhyme with gallon, with the second syllable unstressed and the vowel accordingly reduced to schwa. So did Adam, when the docent called on him. I, however, pronounce talon with two stressed syllables, so that the second vowel is not reduced: /’tælɐn/. Who’s with me?

In the Asia Quest section of the zoo, Adam and I saw langurs. A sign said that langur was Hindi for “sacred monkey”. “I’ll bet it’s not,” I thought. “I’ll bet that langur is Hindi for langur, and that it so happens that langurs are considered sacred in India.” I was right. The Hindi word for sacred is dharmika or any of several other words, none of them forming any part of langur. Monkey in Hindi is kapi or bandara. Meanwhile, as far as I’ve been able to tell, langur in Hindi just means “langur”, and that the word is related to the Sanskrit word for “tailed”.

Their etymology for panda is a bit more accurate: The sign said it came from a Tibetan word meaning “bamboo eater”. The OED backs this up, saying it’s “probably an alteration of the second element of nigálya-pónya“. However, it’s the nigálya part that means “cane-eating” (in Nepali, actually); the Tibetan word pónya, which actually evolved into the current name, just means “animal”. But it’s still true that panda came from a word meaning “bamboo eater”.

In the Australia section, the koala exhibit had a sign saying that koala meant “no water” in the Aborigine language. Their reference to “the” Aborigine language didn’t inspire confidence. Which one did they mean? Aside from that, though, I haven’t found anything to contradict this claim. Do you know anything about it, Claire?

Harry Potter and the Attributive Adverbs

“I’m mad, Dad,” Doug said. He has been wanting to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, preferably with some of his friends, but I’ve been dragging my feet about putting any kind of outing like that together. Unlike when the other HP movies came out, this time Adam is old enough to appreciate it, and I’d like him to be along to see it, too. He hasn’t wanted to see the other ones until recently, but now that he’s been watching them on video with us, I don’t want to leave him out of a family outing to see this one in the theatre. And I don’t want to go as a family when one or two of us has already seen it, either. I’m not going to boycott what sounds like a great movie if some of Doug’s friends invite him to see it with them first, but I’m not going to make a special effort to make that happen.

In that case, why haven’t we gone ahead and seen HP6 as a family? Well, before we do that, to maximize Adam’s enjoyment of it, I want him to have read — or more accurately, heard read aloud — at least the first five Harry Potter books. We listened to Goblet of Fire last summer, but did we then go right on to Order of the Phoenix? No, we did not. I put it off and put it off, and now we find ourselves listening to it in the car, the longest of the seven books in the series, while Doug waits for his chance to see Half-Blood Prince in the theatres. Oh, well. There are plenty of kids who will have to wait for the video, or won’t even be able to see it at all, so I don’t feel too bad about making Doug wait.

Anyway, as I listen to Jim Dale read the book aloud, I stand in awe of his talent. I’ve read articles here and there (usually when a new Harry Potter book was published) about all the voices he’s created for the hundreds of characters, and hearing them for myself, I am amazed at the job he’s done. I don’t think he’s created hundreds of distinct voices, but it’s certainly in the dozens, and even the voices that sound similar he uses consistently. When I read to Doug and Adam, I use my regular voice for the protagonist; then I bring out my Bert voice, my Marvin the Martian voice, my Howard Sprague voice, my gravelly creaky voice, my Cruel Shoes voice, my Simpsons teenager-with-acne voice, very occasionally my Grover/Yoda voice or Mr. Creosote voice, and a few other voices I don’t have names for, by choosing them on the spot when we meet a new character. But if the character disappears for a few chapters and reappears later, I rarely remember what voice I used for them. From now on, I’m going to take my reading aloud up a notch by recording a sample sentence on my iPod for each character to reference later, a technique I read about in one of those articles on Jim Dale.

However, hearing Jim Dale read the books aloud has raised my awareness of a complaint I’ve heard about J. K. Rowling: that she uses too many adverbs. I wrote before that I’d never noticed this, but I am finding it disconcerting as I listen to Jim Dale read the book — sometimes. It sticks out most when she uses them with verbs of attribution, as she does here:

“Keep muttering and I will be a murderer!” said Sirius irritably, and he slammed the door shut on the elf. (p. 110)

I didn’t find it awkward when I read the book myself, but I do now. Is it because I’m now familiar with the complaint about Rowling and her adverbs? Maybe, but here’s what I think is really going on. When I read the book to myself, an adverb like irritably after said is informative. Sure, fiction writers may say, if an author does their job well enough, then it should be obvious how a character says something, and the adverb will be superfluous. But sometimes, a single adverb does the job more quickly than a sentence or two of “show, don’t tell”. However, when Rowling says someone says something sarcastically or loudly or doubtfully, Jim Dale actually says it that way, and you can hear it, and the adverb really is superfluous. By contrast, when he reads that someone performed some non-speech action distractedly or slowly or however else, it still sounds just fine to my ears.

I’ve noticed a couple of other interesting things while listening to the audiobook. Still on the subject of adverbs, Rowling uses a couple of them often enough for me to have noted Jim Dale’s unusual pronunciation of them: dully and shrilly. These adverbs, of course, are formed by suffixing the adjectives dull and shrill with the suffix -ly. Because of a rule of English orthography, we don’t write dullly or shrillly, with three L’s in a row, but that’s how I think of them, and I pronounce them (I think) with an /l/ at the end of the first syllable and an /l/ in the onset of the second one. In phonetic terms, I have a geminate /l/. Dale, however, degeminates the double /l/, pronouncing dully to rhyme with Tully, Sully, and hully gully; and shrilly to rhyme with frilly, silly, and Milli Vanilli. You can see the difference on a spectrogram as well as hear it. I recorded myself and used Praat to find out that my dull-ly and shrill-ly took about 0.6 seconds to pronounce, while dully and shrilly took 2/3 to 3/4 of that time.

Now that I think about it, though, why shouldn’t we get degemination here? It happened with fully and really long ago. Another adverb that Rowling used often enough for me to notice Dale’s pronunciation is coolly, and that one Dale seems to pronounce sometimes with a geminate /l/, and sometimes without. (I wonder how he’d pronounce Pooland.)

As for the other interesting thing I noticed, look at these other sentences with quotations:

“Department of Mysteries,” said the cool female voice, and left it at that. (p. 135)

“I’m going to get started on some homework,” said Ron angrily, and stomped off to the staircase to the boys’ dormitories and vanished from sight. (p. 294)

Did you catch that? No, not the angrily; I’m talking about the unusual (for J. K. Rowling) construction she used in these passages. Follow the last link and this one to see what I’m talking about.

UPDATE, 11 Aug. 2009:

“Now!” said Mrs. Weasley, and withdrew. (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, p. 95)

: : : : : : : : : : : :

Singing Long with the Beatles

As I was driving to the SALT conference last weekend, a song by the Beatles came up on my iPod. It was “I’ll Follow the Sun,” and as always, I found it disconcerting how Paul McCartney tries to sing gone to rhyme with sun in the line:

One day, you’ll look and find I’ve gone.
But tomorrow may rain so I’ll follow the sun.

He doesn’t sing it as [gɔn] (i.e. “gawn”) and forget about trying to rhyme it. Nor does he sing it as [gʌn] (“gun”) to rhyme with sun and forget about trying to be faithful to its pronunciation. He sings it somewhere in between, with a vowel that doesn’t sound quite like English. That disconcertion (disconcertation? disconcert?) is quickly pushed aside by the one that follows in For tomorrow may rain. “Tomorrow may rain”? Can you do that? The only subject I can have with rain is the dummy subject it, unless you’re saying something like “I’ll rain destruction on you!” Checking the CoCA, I see that occasionally the precipitation itself is the subject, as in “I don’t got enough problems dealing with the day-to-day shit that rains from the sky in Manhattan.” Usually it’s precipitation other than rainwater; the examples I saw also included blood and mirror shards. But no tomorrow will rain, yesterday rained or today’s raining. So when I hear the song, I keep trying to hear a very short it squeezed in there that maybe I just didn’t hear all the other times. This time, though, I just didn’t feeling up to doing that, so I jumped to the next song.

What do you know? It was another one by the Beatles. This time it was “From Me to You.” If you haven’t heard it (and even if you have, of course), it goes like this:

The Tiger and the Girl

Albert Wolfe from Laowai Chinese left a comment on the post about the Mission: Impossible III poem, and linked to a short panphonic story he’d written called “The Tiger and the Girl.” It goes like this:

The Tiger and the Girl
by Albert Wolfe

There once was a tiger living in China. Each year he took a ship to an island. He loved visiting the sheep on the beach. One day, after he ate a little sheep, a girl saw him. She said, “What in the world are you doing?” He said, “Because all the sheep are white, they are like toothpaste to me. I usually eat just one sheep every day to keep my teeth clean.” At that time, he took a step and a beige thorn went into the flesh of his paw. He roared. The pain was like fire. The girl was so afraid that she could barely breathe. But she bravely said, “When I need help, I always ask my mother. Would you like my mother to help you? She’s not far away.” The tiger agreed and went with the girl to her hometown. The daughter found her mother, who was a doctor, prancing and singing near a big hedge. She asked her mother to help her new friend that very hour. The mother told the tiger to lie down and be quiet. She pulled the thorn out of his lowered paw. Her husband, who was a lawyer and basketball player, gave the tiger a toy wristwatch. The tiger said, “Thanks a million for everything you’ve done recently.” “It was our pleasure,” replied the couple. And the tiger and the girl went off to take a cab to the zoo.

I wondered if Wolfe had succeeded any better than I had at getting all the allophones of all the phonemes in there, especially since he was not constrained by length, rhyme, and meter. It looks like he came pretty darn close.

Only the Manly

“You’d never catch me sticking my bare hand down a hole like that!” Laura said, as she ran the clippers over the back of my neck. Jim and Stan, two of the other barbers, were sitting in the waiting chairs talking about an outdoor activity that I’d never heard of called noodling. Noodling, I learned, was the sport of catching catfish with just your hand, usually by sticking it into a likely-looking hole in a creek and, if you were lucky enough for a catfish to bite it, pulling out the catfish by its jaw. Part of the thrill was not knowing what might be in one of these holes. Instead of a catfish, it might be nothing at all, or a muskrat, or a snapping turtle. In fact, Stan said, the guy who’d introduced him to noodling was missing a finger — because of an incident involving a gun that he’d picked up by putting his hand over the muzzle.

Then talk turned to the snowstorm we had last week, the one that canceled two days of school for Doug and Adam. That got me to thinking about how many of the allotted “calamity days” for the school year had been used, and while I was doing that, I missed what Jim said next. Laura laughed and I came back to the present.

“Did you hear what they said?” she asked. “Jim and Stan and Harry all came to work that day, but Len was snowed in. So Jim said that only the manly men came in.”

“Ha!” I laughed, and then thought. Hmmm…

Only the manly men came in.

Laura seemed to be speaking from firsthand knowledge when she told me that Jim and Stan and Harry had come in. It sounded like she’d been able to make it to work that day, too. So if my intuition was right, it was not true that only the manly men came in: Only the manly men and Laura had come in!

Heard the Word? The Word Is …

Doug has been taken aback to find that some of his latest spelling words require actual study. When he was making the same mistake on the same words on three tests in a row, I spoke with him about studying his graded tests, and we’ve seen improvement. Doug will still sometimes misspell a word on three tests in a row, but now he’ll misspell it in more than one way.

It brings me back to Doug’s first grade year, when his class was learning to spell the days of the week. Saturday was giving him trouble. Satterday? Sadderday? I wrote Saturday on a paper for him, and observed that it contained the word turd right in the middle. He never misspelled Saturday again, and for a few weeks afterward, he would always pronounce Saturday as “Saa-turd-ay”, or in IPA, [sæː 'tʰrd eI]. Since it was helping him with his spelling, I didn’t explain to him that the word Saturday really didn’t contain the word turd phonetically. Phonetically, Saturday is ['sæDrDeI], with the turd part corresponding to [DrD] — a flap, a syllabic /r/, and another flap. (In fact, the flap is written [ɾ] in the IPA, but I find this symbol too small and too much like [r] to use in this format, so [D] it is. I’m also not bothering with the dot under the [r] to indicate it’s a syllabic [r].) This sequence can’t even stand alone in English, much less be confused with [tʰrd] — an aspirated /t/, a syllabic /r/, and a [d].

A word that’s a little more suitable for scatological reinterpretation came up on last fall’s October 16 episode of The Office. The character Jan had had a baby girl, whom she brought to the office and introduced as

Clumsy Interdental L

About the fourth or fifth time this video played on the overhead flat-screen TV in the gym, I began to notice: Fergie has an interdental L! At least sometimes she does, assuming that she made the same articulatory movements during the lipsynching for the video that she made when she was being recorded in the studio. I’d embed the video here, but it won’t play when I do, so you’ll just have to follow this link to the video on YouTube to check it out. Watch closely at 1:00 for falling and a second later for love; and again at 1:52 and 1:53 for the same words when the chorus is repeated. You’ll see her tongue sticking right out between her upper and lower teeth to make the L’s. The chorus, by the way, is clumsy ’cause I’m falling in love, and as far as I can tell, Fergie’s L in clumsy is an ordinary alveolar one. In between those two times, there’s one more repetition of clumsy ’cause I’m falling in love where the L’s seem to be alveolar. There are other L’s in the song, but not where you get a clear and sufficiently close view of her mouth to see how she’s pronouncing them.

On the other hand… When I realized the video couldn’t be embedded here, and went looking for another copy somewhere, I found this next one, which seems to be a video recording made in the studio, and (one would imagine) not lipsynched. This video gives many clear close-ups for pronunciations of flippin’, fumblin’, slippin’, stumblin’, clumsy ’cause I’m fallin’ in love, and all the L’s there are clearly alveolar, with the tongue tip behind the upper teeth. So I guess the interdental articulation is just for show.

Oh, and did you catch the witchoo pronunciation of with you at the very end?

: : : : : : : : : : : :

Who Put the Inch in Peninsula?

Which one doesn't belong?

One of my readers asked me about the pronunciation of peninsula, wondering if “peninchula” (or “penintula”) was a proper pronunciation. I looked it up in our Random House unabridged dictionary, and found two pronunciations listed, each with the S pronounced [s]. (Two pronunciations? Yes, I’ll come back to that.) So the simple answer is: This pronunciation is not accepted as standard, at least not yet. Corroborating the fact that the “peninchula” pronunciation hasn’t made it into our dictionary are the comments I found via a search for “peninchula”. For example:

• What the heck is a “peninchula”??? (link)
• I wish the narrator would stop saying “peninchula” instead of “peninsula.” (link)
• Can America follow a man who says, peninchula? (link)

But of course, I couldn’t just leave the issue there. I wanted to know why there would be a “peninchula” pronunciation to begin with. I have a phonetically based origin and a morphologically based one. No matter which one is true (if either), I’m sure many of the people who say peninchula do it just because it’s the way they heard others saying it.

Here’s the phonetically based explanation. First of all, notice that peninsula has an [n] immediately followed by [s]. The [n] is a nasal consonant made with the tongue tip touching the alveolar ridge. The [s] is a non-nasal consonant made with the tongue tip almost, but not quite, touching the alveolar ridge. To transition from [n] to the [s], two things must occur simultaneously. One is that the nasal passage must be blocked off to end the [n]. The other is that the tongue tip must lower enough for air to escape over the top of it for the [s]. If the nasal passage is blocked off before this happens, what you’re going to end up with is a non-nasal alveolar stop [t] in the brief interval before once your tongue lowers and you make the [s]. This is how you get the “penintsula” pronunciation (as well as prints for prince and antser for answer).

But penintsula is not peninchula. To rest of the story has to do with the second pronunciation listed in my dictionary. It has a [y] glide between the [s] and the following vowel: “peninsyula”. This [sy] combination is well known to evolve into a [ʃ] sound (for example, in social). While making the [s], the part of the tongue behind the tip starts rising up to the palate in preparation for the [y], and the [s] ends up as its palatal analog [ʃ]. This pronunciation might be written as “peninshula”. At this point, we have the same situation as with the [n] followed by [s]. Unless the blocking of the nasal passage and the lowering of the tongue tip occur simultaneously, you’re going to end up with a [t] in between the [n] and the [ʃ], and as you may recall, [t]+[ʃ] = [tʃ] (sometimes written as [č]). And there it is: “peninchula”.

However, this analysis does not explain why there aren’t speakers out there pronouncing insulate as “inchulate”, consume as “conchume”, or insurance as “inchurance”. That’s why I’m now more inclined to go with a morphological analysis, like the ones proposed for nucular and defibulator. Just as nuclear gets reshaped to end with what looks like a suffix in words like molecular and particular; and defibrillate gets reshaped to end with the pseudo-suffix of words like tabulate, discombobulate, and perambulate; peninsula gets reshaped to end with the perceived -tula suffix of words like spatula or tarantula. In fact, if you follow the link after the “What the heck is a peninchula?” comment above, you’ll find my favorite etymology for the word in one of the responses: Penis+Tarantula=Penintula.

: : : : : : : : : : : :

Arrr-Colored Vowels

Last month, I said

I’ll have more to say about “r-colored vowels” … on September 19.

Now that it’s September 19, it’s time for me to do that. As I wrote in that earlier post, I don’t like how phonics materials, and even phonetics texts, represent the er in landlubber or the ur in scurvy. Sometimes they call them a schwa or short U plus /r/, and sometimes they use the combination symbols [ɚ] (for the unstressed syllable) and [ɝ] (for the stressed one).* To me, though, this syllable just sounds the same as the [r] sound that you get in words like rum, except that instead of being used as a consonant, it’s being used as a vowel. Or in phonetic terms, it’s being used as the nucleus of a syllable.

When a consonant is used this way, it’s referred to as a syllabic consonant. Syllabic consonants are represented in the IPA by a small vertical line under the character, but since I don’t know how to do that in Unicode, I’ll use an underline. Here are a few words with syllabic consonants in English:

• [brn] burn
• [mɪʔn] mitten
• [baɾl] bottle
• [p^hst] psst!
• [s̃ ʌʔm] something (pronounced sumpm)

There are two consonants that have their own designated vowel character for their syllabic versions. Instead of saying “syllabic W”, we just call it a long U ([u] in the IPA). Instead of saying “syllabic Y”, we call it a long E ([i] in the IPA).

Fine, you say. Maybe the vowels represented by er and ur (and for that matter ir as in mirth and ear as in pearl), should all just be considered syllabic [r] in American English. What about other vowel+R combinations, like the ones in Arrr!, corsair, ashore, tour, and buccaneer? Antony Dubach Green has an interesting paper on this very subject. Before I give his claim, some background is in order. I’ve talked about diphthongs before. The most commonly discussed diphthongs in English are [ai] (“long I”) as in Aye, [au] as in now, and [ɔi] as in Ahoy!. Even materials for nonlinguists recognize these as diphthongs. Less easy for English speakers to recognize are the “long A” and “long O” sounds, which are usually pronounced with an [i] or [u] at the end. So hey would be transcribed [hei], and yo ho ho would be transcribed as [youhouhou].** So far, all these diphthongs end in [i] (a high front vowel), and [u] (a high back vowel). Seldom mentioned at all in the introductory phonetics texts I’ve seen is the fact that some diphthongs end in neither a front nor a back vowel, but a central one, specifically [ə]. This typically happens before [l], as in keel, which would be transcribed [k^hiəl̴]. (Also in Neal). This kind of diphthong is known as a centering diphthong.

So at this point, two vowels that also serve as consonants appear as the ending vowel in English diphthongs: [i] and [u]. Why don’t we also have diphthongs that end in our other vowel that also serves as a consonant, namely [r]? That, in fact, is the gist of Green’s claim, which builds on a similar claim from John Harris’s 1994 book English Sound Structure. He concludes that some Vowel+[r] sequences are actually diphthongs that end in [r]. Specifically, they are the r-colored vowels in Arrr!, corsair, and ashore. He also argues that the r-colored vowel in scurvy and landlubber is a diphthong, but that’s where he and I differ, since (as I said earlier) I’d call it a syllabic [r]. However, Green believes that sequences of a high vowel followed by [r] — in other words, the [ir] and [ur] sequences in buccaneer and tour — really do consist of a vowel followed by [r], in the same way as you can have two vowels in a row that don’t form a diphthong, as in rio.

What is Green’s evidence for this claim? To support the claim that at least one r-colored vowel behaves like a diphthong, he cites a 1990 study by A. C. Cohn, who observed that after a speaker pronounces a nasal consonant ([m, n, ŋ]), the nasal passage closes back up again over the course of one vowel. Diphthongs act as a single vowel, so that in a word like night, the [i] part of the [ai] diphthong is still nasal; that is, air is still exiting through the nose. Cohn noted that the [r] in more was also still nasalized, indicating that the [ɔr] sequence is acting like a diphthong. However, the [o] in neo and the [r] in near are not nasalized, indicating that [io] and [ir] are not diphthongs, but two-segment sequences.

As for the rest of the r-colored vowels, Green offers evidence from a language game called Uzzlefuzz, in which every syllable of a word is replaced by V+uzzle+V, where V represents the original vowel in the syllable. Thus, keel would be keezlefeel, and booty would become boozlefooteezlefee. Diphthongs count as a single vowel, so aye would be [aizlfai], not [azlfai]. The words nurse, sharp, scarce, and north treat the r-colored vowel like a diphthong, resulting in nurzlefurse, sharzlefarp, scarzlefarce, norzleforth. But [ir] and [ur] are treated as separate segments, so that fierce and poor (presumably pronounced to rhyme with tour) become feezlefierce and poozlefoor, and not fierzlefierce and poorzlefoor.

So avast, me hearties, and welcome aboard syllabic [r] and its r-final diphthongs [ar], [ɛr], and [ɔr]!

*Since I’m doing a whole post about [r], I should note that [r] is not the IPA symbol for the (American) English R sound. In the IPA, [r] represents the trilled R, as in Spanish perro, while the English R is represented as [ɹ]. However, since I won’t be talking about both of these sounds, I’m just not going to bother.

**The consonant Y sound is not represented as [y] in the IPA, but as [j]. For easier reading for a nonlinguist audience, I’m using [y] anyway.

: : : : : : : : : : : :