Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER
In this column I will be speaking not of words but of almost-words, those expressive sounds we make that are meaningful but not, for the most part, composed of phonemes and integrated into the grammar of our language. Phonemes are the set of regular sounds that make up words; they are not meaningful in themselves but generate meanings because of features that distinguish one from another. English has three “labial” consonants, for example, made by our lips: p, b, and m. The first two stop the air for an instant, but p is voiceless while b is voiced. That split-second difference of vocal onset is enough, to an English-speaker, to distinguish punch from bunch. The m stops the air in the mouth but deviates it through the nose, so it can be sustained, as in “mmm, that tastes good.” It’s different from its labial kindred, so munch is neither punch nor bunch.
The sounds I want to talk about are sometimes called “paraverbal sounds,” because they lie aside from the “verbal” sounds that enter into a language’s word-making system. They are therefore hard to spell. Take tsk-tsk: it stands for what phonologists would call an “alveolar click”; it is made at the hard palate, and it is like a t but air is sucked in rather than pushed out. There is really no s in it, let alone a k, and for that reason it is sometimes spelled tut-tut, but that is to give it a vowel, which it certainly does not have. A third way is tch-tch, and that seems best, though still inadequate. We may seldom be called upon to spell the sound, but we use it all the time to express disapproval or commiseration, sometimes with a shake of the head.
Because this sound so often appears in writing, two of the spellings have engendered new words. The Oxford English Dictionary enters tut as a word (an interjection) and quotes several passages, so it seems that people have been saying tut for the alveolar suck since at least 1529. For the spelling tsk the OED cites nothing earlier than 1947 (a book on phonemics), but there must be earlier examples. Both tut and tsk, now that they are spelled as words, can become verbs and nouns. A friend of mine once joked that he was “taken to tsk” by his girlfriend. As a true word, though, I think we need to add a vowel to the spelling: tisk.
Something called the glottal stop is not an English phoneme, though it arguably distinguishes two paraverbal expressions from each other with opposite meanings. We say something like uh-huh to mean “yes,” and uh-uh to mean “no.” What separates the two parts of “no” is not just the absence of the h-sound but the presence of the glottal stop, a little choke-like constriction deep in the throat. We use it as well to separate the two parts of uh-oh (or oh-oh), which expresses alarm or worry. It’s meaningful in these two places, but some people use it as a variant of t, or a double t, in words like kitten and flatten, or as a variant of d in couldn’t. There it is an “allophone” of t or d, and does not distinguish words from each other. An extreme example is something, as in “That’s really something,” which we might spell su’m, where the apostrophe is the glottal stop and the m indicates a syllable mm.
If the glottal stop seems unworthy of serious attention, we should remember that the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet (the same as the Hebrew alphabet) represented the glottal stop. It was a sign that resembled the head of an ox, and the word for “ox” in Phoenician was spelled (in our letters) ’lp, with the apostrophe standing for the glottal stop. The Phoenician alphabet had no vowels, but we think that word was pronounced ’alep. When the Greeks adopted and adapted the alphabet they had no need for a glottal stop, but they did need vowels. (For complicated reasons Greek, like English, needs to write vowels much more than Phoenician did.) Since the first vowel sounded in ’alep is an a, pronounced like the a in father, the Greeks made the character stand for that sound, and called it alpha. Our letter A, then, is a direct descendant of the character for a little choking sound in the throat.
Everyone’s favorite paraverbal sound is the “raspberry” or (in America) the “Bronx cheer,” used for derision or jeering. It has been described as a “voiceless linguo-labial trill,” and an International Phonetic Alphabet symbol has been found for it, though it seems not to be a phoneme in any language. There is no good way to spell it: prrraprrp? pfrfrfrfrp? It is called a raspberry because of British rhyming slang, whereby the word is a familiar modifier of an unspoken word (here tart) that rhymes with another (fart), which is what it means, though in this case it seems likely that raspberry also suggests rasp, a good enough description of the sound. From raspberry we get the noun and verb razz (for jeer).
A related type of more-or-less words is onomatopoeia, particularly those that imitate sounds made by animals or natural objects or machines. Many of them have fully entered the phonemic pattern of their language and become conventionalized as fully fledged words, such as woof or bow-wow, splash or pitter-patter, pop or boom. Cock-a-doodle-doo is a fairly weak imitation of the cock’s crow, but if you try to really imitate the bird, with a roughly er-vowel and several glottal stops marking four or five syllables in a fairly high pitch, you will have made a paraverbal sound ancestral to our conventional word. Which brings me to a dispute among linguists that I’ll end by describing.
Some linguists argue that the phonemic repertory of a language and its rules of word-forming eventually remake all onomatopoeic words or para-words into something very different from what they were originally, and different from what happens to them in other languages. Convention overpowers nature. So cock-a-doodle-doo, they say, is not only quite different from the actual sound of a rooster but quite different from what roosters “say” in other languages: in French it is cocorico, in German kikeriki, in Hungarian kukuriku, in Japanese kokekokk?, in Persian ghughuli-ghughu, in Hindi kukruukuu, in Sundanese kongkorongok, in Thai ake-e-ake-ake, and in Tagalog kukaok or tik-ti-laok or ta-tala-ok or ko-ko-ro-kok. To some ears these may sound widely different, but to mine, and to those of other linguists, they sound quite similar. If the conventions of different languages tend to cause the cock’s crow to drift apart, after all, the cocks themselves keep giving lessons in pronunciation. They won’t let us humans get away with saying that the birds say woof or moo or meow. It’s got to be something like cock-a-doodle-doo.
We humans, we should keep in mind, are also animals. Especially when we are little, we take great delight in imitating sounds that don’t belong to the language we will soon acquire, including raspberries.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.’Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.