A phoneme is a unit of spoken language, such as vowels and consonants. But there are consonants in English that don\u2019t exist in other languages, such as the mixed sound of th as in \u201cthink\u201d\u2014which tends to be difficult for some folks in other countries. It tends to be pronounced as a soft d, \u201ct\u2019ink.\u201d Dat\u2019s why in gangster movies dey talk like dat\u2014it\u2019s an urban accent from the Northeast, where many people were immigrants from Europe. Interestingly, there are two phonemes associated with the sound \u201cth\u201d\u2014 the is really a dh sound, a \u201chard\u201d th as in the or they rather than the \u201csoft\u201d th as in think or with. In words such as the or this, the tongue pushes against the palato-dental ridge in making a brief d-like sound; the \u201csoft\u201d th as in with is merely a tongue between the teeth letting the air pass by, a type of \u201cfricative.\u201d (Actually, the two consonants had their own signs in the middle ages that became obliterated with the complexities of printing. The soft th was \u0275 (theta) or \u00de (\u201cthorn\u201d), while the hard th as in the might be represented by a \u00f0. As to this last, amplifying the upper crossed slanty line and minimizing the circle below and it looks like a kind of Y which was then misinterpreted as \u201cYe\u201d as in Ye Olde Tavern in old English. But the sound for Ye was really \u00f0 — a hard dth.) <\/p>\n
Anyway, I think this might be imagined as a bit of a game, playing with your mouth in ways that are not official. We all did this as kids as a form of play, learning to make fart-like sounds and other squeeky and odd mouth sounds. What if it were a unit in Language Arts (also known as English in the olden days) in middle school? Kids could learn to pronounce the Kh gutteral sound as in the German, \u201cAch\u201d (meaning \u201coh!\u201d Or \u201cHey!\u201d or in Achtung: Attention), or the Scots \u201cLoch\u201d for lake, or, dare we invite people finally learn to pronounce the Hebrew Kh sound as in Khanukah? Many pronounce it Hanukah, with the h very soft, just the slightly pressured breathy h sound. But tighten the back of your throat as if you had to cough-spit up a tiny bone from a fish that got stuck there\u2014kh-kh-kh\u2013 that\u2019s the kh sound! It\u2019s in Arabic and many other languages, too\u2014it\u2019s called a guttural H. <\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s the side problem of orthography, how something is spelled, and the tendency for that K sound sometimes in English to be written as a C, and similarly the Ch sound, as in Christmas, also to be written as a ch. But Ch also carries the sound of tsh, a compound t and a sh sound, as in chop\u2014or, phonemically, tshop. Which is different from simple shop. Anyway, there are people I meet who see Hanukah also spelled Chanukah and pronounce it tchanukah. Sigh. <\/p>\n
So, let\u2019s promote phonemic expansion into the gutteral phoneme, kh. They say, \u201cLet\u2019s get the Christ back into Christmas\u201d\u2014alluding to the religious theme not becoming subsumed by the crass commercialism, but what\u2019s also funny is that the Ch sound was originally the same guttural Kh, from the ancient Greek letter written as an X \u2014 Khristos was not a sharp k, which is a consonant produced by the tongue against the back of the palate, but further back, the aforementioned gutteral kh. Khristmas, Khanukah, it\u2019s the same game of phonemic expansion. <\/p>\n
Not that this is the only phonemic expansion in the game\u2014there are phonemes from many languages, and as our country becomes more multi-cultural, it could be a fun game to more explicitly learn to pronounce things that those raised in strict ordinary English don\u2019t learn as kids! <\/p>\n
(There\u2019s also the importation of words and phrases from other languages and cultures, but that will be addressed later!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A phoneme is a unit of spoken language, such as vowels and consonants. But there are consonants in English that don\u2019t exist in other languages, such as the mixed sound of th as in \u201cthink\u201d\u2014which tends to be difficult for some folks in other countries. It tends to be pronounced as a soft d, \u201ct\u2019ink.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foolin","category-scriptology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}