23.
Phonotactics V: Exceptions and odd syllable types
(with
PC desktop dictionary)
Note: Make sure that you have the Lucida Sans Unicode font installed in your computer so that the IPA symbols will display correctly.
Some
of the rhymes suggested by "Rhyme" are foreign loans (like
raison [French 'reason'] and
habenicht [from German Habenichts,
a 'have-not']), little-known or rare words (like plake
[a decorative cloth] and pleva [a
rare skin disorder]), or proper nouns like Plescia
or Sven.
These should be excluded from your results when doing phonotactics exercises
such as those on the preceding page.
Onomatopoeia
(擬聲字 ni3sheng1 zi4) also often breaks the usual phonotactic rules of
a language e.g. boing (note how the [ɔ]
sound moving to an [ɪ] suggests
the motion of an object springing upward) and vroom. How many
other examples of onomatopoeia can you find that break the usual rules of English
phonotactics? Can you think of some Mandarin or Taiwanese examples?
(Hint: Comics
in any language are a good place to find more examples; here's a page of exclamations
from comics; and here's one on onomatopoeia
for children.)
Unusual, if not forbidden, sequences may be created
by the formation of contractions. Don't and won't, for
example, are the only English words ending in [oʊnt].
Try to find some 'forbidden' syllable types created by Chinese contractions,
e.g. say the expression 根本 gen1ben3 as in 根本不要 gen1ben3 bu2yao4
'I don't want
it at all' quickly, and you may hear something like ge:m4, although final
/m/ is not allowed in Mandarin.
Abbreviations and acronyms may
also result in unusual combinations, e.g. WAP ('Wireless application
protocol') is a little odd in English; instead of /w/,
we'd expect the underlying phoneme [hw]
(or [ʍ]), represented in spelling
by wh-. Although many people do not distinguish /w/
and /hw/ in their speech, many do retain
/hw/ as an underlying phoneme which
affects the following vowel, and a word like wap is odd. wa- at
the beginning of a word, e.g. watch, wad, watt, tends to be pronounced
as /ɑ/, while the vowel in WAP
is usually pronounced /æ/, to rhyme
with rap or
tap.
You may not always agree that a word suggested
by "Rhyme" is really a good match, either due to alternate pronunciations
(e.g. the first 'a' in patronage can be pronounced either [æ]
or [eɪ]), or allophonic variation
(e.g. should the first three sounds of plague be matched with plate
or plaque?), so don't take all the matches at face value.
To filter out words that are generally not found
in the active or passive vocabularies of an average or even well-educated English
speaker, and which thus don't 'count', it is best to double check your results
in a regular English-English dictionary, such as the online Merriam-Webster
Dictionary.
For a useful PC desktop dictionary, try the WordWeb
thesaurus and dictionary, which you can download (it's 19.1MB) for
free at:
http://wordweb.info/free/
The pay version of WordWeb (WordWeb
Pro 2.1), has more features, including search functions which
could replace "Rhyme"; but a combination of Rhyme,
WordWeb,
OneLook
Dictionary Search, the Scrabble
resources, and some of the Wordplays.com puzzle
solving tools will give you many functions useful in phonetics
and phonology for free.
Word games are probably found in all languages and cultures, even ones that do not have their own writing system. There are lots of very popular English word games that play with the phonotactic possibilities of words in many different ways, including "Scrabble", which we've already made a first acquaintance with. You've been working hard – the next page will introduce some games for you to have fun with (as though you needed another reason to spend more time at your PC!). These games mostly rely on spelling rather than just sound, but spelling does reflect pronunciation in an indirect way, so the games can give you some feeling for the ways our brain deals with English phonotactics. Some of them you may already be familiar with, especially if English is your first language or you have lived in an English-speaking country. Others may be new to you, or maybe you didn't know where to find them on the Internet...
Next:
Playtime:
Phonotactic
games
on
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