This is the sound of a spluttered Bl… a \u201craspberry\u201d as a term for the sound made of slightly sticking out your tongue and making an impudent noise. Bbbbl is a sound followed by a sort of soft or silent L. If you think about it, BbbbL is one phoneme. It often is a sound that expresses impudence, or gives a \u201cyou stink\u201d message at sports events. It can express mild disdain or tiredness, as an equivalent for saying \u201cpish tush!\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a funny sound, an undignified sound. But what struck me today is that it\u2019s the \u201csound\u201d that all the tree and flower buds are silently making to express their blossoming this springtime! I thought how funny it would be if the phoneme of bbblossoming expresses the childish delight in coming forth. I looked more closely at some tree buds puffing out with the tips of leaves, and it seemed that each different petal or leaf was sort of saying a soft, plosive \u201cb.\u201d<\/p>\n
In springtime, the buds of leaves and trees sort of bbbblossom. Once they get started, all you see is the blossom, but it\u2019s the budding-blossoming I\u2019m talking about, a process of multi-leaf puffing up and slightly, softly, birthing, gradually slowly bursting. It\u2019s quite amazing if you can see it so. It expresses Spppprrrringtime. (Giggle.)<\/p>\n
My name, \u201cBlatner,\u201d can begin with a soft spluttered Bbbbl sound. Pronouncing it thus is impossible with any dignity. What if my elf-name were indeed Bbbblatner, a silly raspberrry spluttery name. That would be consistent with an elfin identity. <\/p>\n
Of course, for non-elfin, ordinary humans, I stay with the hard middle-European BL phoneme, often associated with Herr Doktor Blatner, for more formality. The other part of me is whatever the opposite of formality is\u2014way beyond informal. Maybe a bit silly. Oh, well. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is the sound of a spluttered Bl… a \u201craspberry\u201d as a term for the sound made of slightly sticking out your tongue and making an impudent noise. Bbbbl is a sound followed by a sort of soft or silent L. If you think about it, BbbbL is one phoneme. It often is a sound […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foolin","category-favoritethings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1722"}],"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=1722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1723,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1722\/revisions\/1723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}