Univocalic
Nov. 18th, 2018 08:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistI just remembered another thing about this weekend which I wanted to include and the last entry is too long anyway so I'll start a new one: the compere at the gig last night seems to like univocalic poems -- ones written entirely with a single vowel -- because he did a couple of those.
I found them really confusing now because I've been taught enough linguistics that "vowel" doesn't mean a letter to me any more; it means a sound. Especially when they're spoken-word poems. I remember "Good Morn" kept appearing in the one about Piers Morgan ("Morgs") and words like that may all be spelled with the same vowel but they sound so different!
(Also it really bugged me that he wasn't counting the letter "y" as a vowel! This is how Stuart and I had a play-fight about whether "crywank" is a univocalic word.)
So now I'm wondering if I can manage a univocalic poem with only one vowel sound in it.
And which one? /i/? /ɪ/? /ɛ/? /aɪ/ because its my favorite diphthong? I immediately thought of /ə/ because it's the most common vowel in English but of course it doesn't really occur on its own because its whole deal is that its only used in unstressed syllables (you can buy t-shirts that say "I want to be like the English schwa, it's never stressed!").
Still pondering this.
I found them really confusing now because I've been taught enough linguistics that "vowel" doesn't mean a letter to me any more; it means a sound. Especially when they're spoken-word poems. I remember "Good Morn" kept appearing in the one about Piers Morgan ("Morgs") and words like that may all be spelled with the same vowel but they sound so different!
(Also it really bugged me that he wasn't counting the letter "y" as a vowel! This is how Stuart and I had a play-fight about whether "crywank" is a univocalic word.)
So now I'm wondering if I can manage a univocalic poem with only one vowel sound in it.
And which one? /i/? /ɪ/? /ɛ/? /aɪ/ because its my favorite diphthong? I immediately thought of /ə/ because it's the most common vowel in English but of course it doesn't really occur on its own because its whole deal is that its only used in unstressed syllables (you can buy t-shirts that say "I want to be like the English schwa, it's never stressed!").
Still pondering this.
Peek Language Nerd, You Have Reached it
Date: 2018-11-18 11:00 pm (UTC)Re: Peek Language Nerd, You Have Reached it
Date: 2018-11-19 05:24 am (UTC)Re: Peek Language Nerd, You Have Reached it
Date: 2018-11-19 03:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-21 08:07 am (UTC)