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Transcript Episode 92: Brunch, gonna, and fozzle - The smooshing episode

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Brunch, gonna, and fozzle - The smooshing episode. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about smooshing words together. But first, our most recent bonus episode was about secret codes, ciphers, Hildegard von Bingen, cryptography, cryptic crosswords, and Morse code romance. You can listen to it at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: Also on Patreon, we have 80-plus other bonus episodes on things like swearing and linguistics in fiction and other behind-the-scenes things from Lingthusiasm.

Lauren: Bonus episodes are around the same length as main episodes, but we sometimes do slightly different things like a deep dive into a single academic paper or AMAs and updates on our other projects. Sometimes, we get a little bit silly.

Gretchen: We run on the direct support of our listeners, which means we don’t have to run ads. If you’d like to help us keep existing and making these free episodes for everyone, we’d really appreciate it if you’d consider becoming a patron. Or if you were a patron for a while, and you had to leave for a bit, we’d also love to see you back. There are more bonus episodes for you to enjoy now!

[Music]

Lauren: Gretchen, I have some words that are made up of two other words. I’m going to make you guess what the other two words are that they’re made up from.

Gretchen: Okay, sounds fun.

Lauren: Our first word is “motel.”

Gretchen: Ah, this one I know. This is a “motor hotel.”

Lauren: It is, indeed, because you can drive your car all the way up to the door of your room.

Gretchen: Absolutely. I assume this was invented around when the car became popular, I guess.

Lauren: I had thought that it was maybe a mid-century, being in the ’50s or ’60s when cars really took off, but apparently the earliest citation is from 1925.

Gretchen: That is earlier than I thought it was. Okay, next word.

Lauren: “Smog.”

Gretchen: “Smog.” Yes. This one I know – from “smoke” and “fog,” right?

Lauren: It is indeed that disgusting, thick combination of smoke and fog. That’s from 1905 – a particularly disgusting winter in London.

Gretchen: Also earlier than I expected.

Lauren: Mm-hmm. “Brunch.”

Gretchen: “Brunch.” Now, that is definitely a modern word from “breakfast” and “lunch.” I do it all the time.

Lauren: An absolutely indispensable part of my vocabulary, but it is from 1896.

Gretchen: 1896? They were having brunch in 1896. I love it!

Lauren: Yeah, because it is a very useful concept.

Gretchen: It is, indeed. Okay, I’m feeling really good about these portmanteaus so far. Hit me with another one.

Lauren: “Mizzle.”

Gretchen: Ooo, “mizzle.” I wanna say that one’s from “mist” and “drizzle”?

Lauren: It is, actually. Nice work.

Gretchen: It’s really giving me Ms. Frizzle vibes.

Lauren: If Ms. Fizzle wanted to be more efficient, she’d become “mizzle.”

Gretchen: Yeah. I have no idea how old that one is. Because all of these have been much older than I was expecting, so maybe it dates to around “smog,” I dunno.

Lauren: No, this one is much more recent. It’s one of those late-20th Century / early-21st Century as part of this explosion of these kind of words. The next one is “fozzle.”

Gretchen: “Fozzle.” That’s definitely a Muppet.

Lauren: It does sound like a Muppet name, doesn’t it? Something fuzzy.

Gretchen: Yeah, okay, no, that’s Fozzie Bear, okay. It’s a fake nozzle. It’s a fuzzy nozzle. Fuzzy nozzle is my final answer.

Lauren: Think of it in the context of “mizzle.”

Gretchen: Oh, um, wait, okay, could it be “fog” and “drizzle”?

Lauren: It is, indeed. Lots of subtle gradations on weather, apparently, require a more nuanced creation of new blend words.

Gretchen: I have never heard anyone call it “fozzle.”

Lauren: Great, good. Our final one is “brinkles.”

Gretchen: “Brinkles.” I wanna say, you know, inspired by “brunch,” that’s “breakfast sprinkles”?

Lauren: That does actually sound delicious.

Gretchen: You guys have fairy bread in Australia. That’s sprinkles on bread. That could be breakfast sprinkles, yeah? No?

Lauren: The list that I took it from has it as “bed wrinkles.”

Gretchen: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That’s much less fun. I don’t care about bed wrinkles at all. I want some breakfast sprinkles.

Lauren: I deliberately chose some very effective classics and some maybe not-so-effective failures, but we are living in this era of portmanteau word explosions. I guess an explosion goes outward, and it’s more like an implosion of two words coming together to create some new word.

Gretchen: There’s a lot of different ways that words can get smooshed together – to use the very technical term of “smooshing.” I wanna say that in some ways “smooshing” is not a technical term, but I have actually been to a linguistics workshop where people were talking about words like “smooshing” into each other and “glomming” onto each other.

Lauren: Oh, “glom.”

Gretchen: Mm, “glom.” It’s not that this is never used, actually, despite seeming a bit silly. It’s tempting, when we’re looking at a dictionary-style sense of words, to think of them as these atomic units that have these clear, white spaces between them. But in practicality, words are often getting smooshed together, squished together, these very visceral [squish noises] words.

Lauren: It sounds unpleasantly messy to my mind, but I guess we’ll stick with it.

Gretchen: Would you say it “squicks” you out, for another one?

Lauren: It “squicks” me out a little bit, for sure.

Gretchen: Okay. I find them very delightful. I think it’s really vivid and, you know, like “slime” that all the kids are into these days.

Lauren: And, as we’ll discover in this episode, incredibly useful words are constantly coming together, crashing into each other, smooshing together as part of the process of how language grows and changes.

Gretchen: It’s a really fun concept. Portmanteaus are one relatively vivid example of smooshing because we’re often still aware of “breakfast” and “lunch” or “motor” and “hotel.” You can see the connection for how they came to smoosh together very vividly.

Lauren: In this episode, we’re gonna look at two very different kinds of linguistic smooshing and how bringing together sounds and meanings in different ways can affect the way that language is used and how it changes.

Gretchen: We did, ages ago, an episode about several different kinds of linguistic nothings, about different ways that aspects of nothing or silence or absence of a thing can mean something. Those came from a whole bunch of different areas. When we were talking about different kinds of linguistic smooshing, that also seemed like a chance to talk about different types of linguistic phenomena that all have this thing in common where the words glom onto each other.

Lauren: We couldn’t help but start with the portmanteau.

Gretchen: Absolutely. The thing that fascinates me about portmanteaus is that some of them really work, like “frenemy,” that’s great. What a good and useful combination which, surprisingly, dates back to 1891.

Lauren: I feel like it’s one of those such satisfying combinations that I’d be unsurprised to discover people have coined it and coined it again.

Gretchen: Yeah, because it’s got this great sense of dissonance between frenemies, but yeah, the OED has it from 1891, even though it feels very modern – to modern-day “Kenergy” or “Kenough” from Ken in the Barbie movie. Portmanteaus are still going. We’re still coining them.

Lauren: English in particular seems particularly prone to them.

Gretchen: I have encountered some examples of portmanteaus in Spanish. If you’re combining English and Spanish in the same sentence, some people might refer to that as “Spanglish” in English. But I’m told that you can also call “Espanglish” in Spanish.

Lauren: Oh, that’s very satisfying. The portmanteau works in both languages so similarly.

Gretchen: I have also come across “amigovio,” which is from “amigo” and “novio,” so that’s “friend” and “boyfriend” or “girlfriend,” to refer to, you know, some relationship that’s got a few aspects of both – maybe friend-with-benefits type thing.

Lauren: Ah, yeah. I do like how portmanteaus pop up when there’s this really satisfying meaning that’s carved out of the two words that come together. They often do fill these cultural niches for some period of time.

Gretchen: Exactly. There’s a really fun Wikipedia article for “blend words,” which is the more technical linguistic term for what’s popularly known as “portmanteau” that has lots of fun examples in various languages. We’re not just gonna read a Wikipedia article to you, but if you want to go click on that, you can.

Lauren: I think “blend” really highlights how you’re blending together the sounds at the end of one word and the beginning of another word, but you’re also blending together the semantics of both of those words.

Gretchen: Do you wanna hear my favourite example of an absolutely multi-step, amazing blend in English?

Lauren: Sure.

Gretchen: Okay. Do you know the word “brot3”?

Lauren: Uh, I absolutely do not. Is that a robot?

Gretchen: This is not R2D2’s cousin.

Lauren: My favourite Star Wars character when people ask now, I’m gonna say, “It’s brot3.”

Gretchen: This is a very Tumblr-in-the-2010s word, I will say, which dates me.

Lauren: I think it’s also good to point out that cultures can be the entirety of English when it comes to “motel” or Tumblr in the 2010s when it comes to “brot3.”

Gretchen: It starts with an acronym, which is “OTP,” which stands for “one true pairing.”

Lauren: Okay, acronym, another classic 20th Century obsession of English.

Gretchen: Absolutely. People who would say, “Oh, these two characters on this show” – or in this book or movie – “I think they should get together. They’re my one true pairing.” Things like that. But then this takes on a hyperbolic meaning, so it doesn’t have to be an actual one pairing that I think is the best, it can just be like, “I think these two characters should get together” or it would be interesting if they got together. Then people start saying, “Well, what if three characters got together?” So, instead of an “OTP,” you had an “OT3”?

Lauren: Mm-hmm, I’m following.

Gretchen: Yeah. But then, if you want three characters to interact in more of a platonic way, maybe like they’re bros, you could then have a “Bro-T3,” which is where the portmanteau part comes in.

Lauren: Amazing. So many processes happening to create this one lexical item.

Gretchen: It’s beautiful, and I love it.

Lauren: And, again, really carving out this particular cultural need. That’s part of what makes a successful portmanteau successful. There’s some really great work from Constantine Lignos and Hilary Prichard where they quantified what makes a good blend word, which I thought was really great. Some of those words I chose for you at the start, Gretchen, came from their less-successful list.

Gretchen: I thought those were very unsuccessful words like “fozzle” and “brinkles.”

Lauren: They also had on that list “wonut.”

Gretchen: “Wonut.” Uh. Oh, wait.

Lauren: It’s not a sad donut.

Gretchen: It’s a donut full of woe. It’s a sad donut. Okay, no, wait, it’s probably like a “waffle donut”?

Lauren: Yeah. In the vein of the “cronut,” the croissant donut, there was this – or it still is an ongoing combination of carb-based bakery foods that tend to get portmanteaued.

Gretchen: Yeah, okay, I dunno. The cronut is fine, but I don’t think wonuts are gonna happening any time soon.

Lauren: And “wegotism.”

Gretchen: No.

Lauren: I love that you refuse to even try and define it for me. You’re just like, “Whatever that is – no.”

Gretchen: I mean, I guess it’s from “we” and “egotism,” but I don’t like it.

Lauren: Yeah, it’s egotism but for more than one person. There’s nothing like seeing a portmanteau that falls flat to make you appreciate how satisfying a really good one is.

Gretchen: Tell me some other good ones. Please wash my brain out of this.

Lauren: Some of the good ones include “mathlete,” “guestimate,” and “mockumentary.”

Gretchen: All really satisfying in a way that “wegotism” just doesn’t do it for me.

Lauren: That’s because you can understand them, and you can figure them out from their constituent parts without needing me to prompt you that we’re talking about baked goods or weather.

Gretchen: One of the other ones that they pointed out as a – I’ll let you guess whether this was a good or a bad example, but I think it’ll be pretty obvious – was “groutfit.”

Lauren: A “groutfit.” Is that when you have an outfit with lots of tiling grout holding it together?

Gretchen: Well, this is the point they make in the paper is “Is it a green outfit, a grey outfit, a great outfit?”

Lauren: No, it’s a “grout-outfit.”

Gretchen: That’s the only version that’s satisfying.

Lauren: If you had an outfit that was made of grout, that would be a very satisfying blend word.

Gretchen: You can dress like that for Halloween.

Lauren: I feel like that’s low on what they call “applicability.” It’s not very applicable to many contexts except maybe if you’re at a fancy dress party for tilers.

Gretchen: If anyone has any pictures of internet groutfits, we do want to see them. One of their factors is understandability, which “groutfit” fails on if it stands for “green” or “grey” or “great.” And another factor is applicability, which “groutfit” fails on if it stands for “grout” and “outfit.”

Lauren: A word has to fit your mouth in a really satisfying way that “guestimate” and “mockumentary” do. The overlap there is so nice, and it feels like a real word.

Gretchen: It has this sense of it feels English-y already. It feels like it’s typical of the language. It helps – and think this is a really interesting factor when it comes to portmanteaus – if the combined words share a syllable or at least a sound, especially a vowel sound. So, “glitterati,” “gaydar, “hacktivism” – all really great.

Lauren: There’s a nice, big, clear hinge at the two points of the word.

Gretchen: You have that “litter” – “glitterati,” which goes from “glitter” to “litterati.” You’ve got a whole “litter” for them to overlap at, which is great, whereas something like, what do you think of “legacyquel”?

Lauren: “Lega- legacy” – “legacy” is a word, and “sequel” is a word, but there’s too much overlap there for my mouth and brain to cope with.

Gretchen: Also, they’re spelled very differently, the C in “legacy” is with C-Y, versus S-E for “sequel,” which makes it look really weird on the page.

Lauren: I’ve just looked at where you’ve written that down on the page, and like, I didn’t even look at that as an English word.

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s really bad. How do you feel about “privelobliviousness”?

Lauren: It sounds like a very fancy word, and it looks like an absolute car crash written down.

Gretchen: It just doesn’t look like the other words that we have in English. Or “gymtimidation.”

Lauren: Again, I think with English it’s such a writing-based language that for any portmanteau to have legs, it has to be satisfying written down as well as spoken.

Gretchen: They also had “condesplaining” in their list, which I will grant, written down, doesn’t look too bad, but yeah, I dunno.

Lauren: I think that’s because a lot of the time another thing that blends have going for them is that they’re fun.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: It’s a fun and playful thing, and “condesplaining” is not necessarily a thing you’ll use in a fun way.

Gretchen: I mean, like “mansplaining” has definitely caught on, but it doesn’t have that extra syllable of “condesplaining,” which really makes the word seem more insufferable. But their examples of fun words like “Sharknado” and “sheeple,” I’m like, “Yeah!”

Lauren: Yeah, I think portmanteaus are definitely a kind of word play, and the more novel-but-satisfying a portmanteau you can come up with, the better a success that is.

Gretchen: I first got introduced to the linguistic analysis of portmanteaus through a paper by a linguist that I knew in grad school named Cara DiGirolamo. She was analysing specifically fandom pairing names. This is things like if you have Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, and you call them “Johnlock” or something like that. She was analysing, in particular, names from the TV show “Glee,” which was popular at the time, and how the fans talked about various combinations of wanting those characters to get together by combining their names into portmanteaus.

Lauren: Right. A very useful activity for people deep in this particular fandom.

Gretchen: And a very useful activity for linguists because sometimes it’s hard to come up with, okay, we need these two words to combine with each other, and then we also need it to have a plausible meaning, and so on and so forth, whereas with the characters, you can just pick any two characters and be like, “What if they were a couple?” You can end up with these phonologically implausible combinations because, obviously, the creators of the show weren’t thinking, “Oh, I’ve got to name my characters stuff that will be combined well.”

Lauren: Of course, this is why big linguistics bankrolls major TV and pop culture so that we can create the conditions in which we can study the ways that people blend character names to create fandom pairings.

Gretchen: Absolutely I wish that was the case.

Lauren: I assume this is how she collected her data.

Gretchen: I think she may have been hanging out with the fandom, to be fair, at the time.

Lauren: Right, okay, was more of an anthropological observation thing than billionaire-media-mogul-creates-natural-experiment thing.

Gretchen: Please, if there are any billionaire media moguls listening who want to fund this research –

Lauren: Have we got some natural experiments for you to run.

Gretchen: We can connect you with some grad students. She has this really fun case study of the two characters Rachel Berry and Quinn Fabray, who various members of the fandom wanted to get together. At first, they made their pairing name “Quichel,” which is from “Quinn” and “Rachel.”

Lauren: Okay, I guess it is – “Quinn” and “Rachel.” “Quichel”? “Quichel.”

Gretchen: Yeah, well, so it’s sort of fine if you say it out loud, but if you write it down, a lot of people see it, and they think “quiche,” like the food.

Lauren: Oh, “quiche” – “Quiche-el.” Yum?

Gretchen: Yeah, but not exactly like the connotation that they were trying to convey. The fandom actually decided that “Quichel,” “Quiche-el,” was too difficult of a pairing name combination to have. They held a vote for what should be the replacement name for referring to the combination of these two characters.

Lauren: Very democratic.

Gretchen: They ended up with “Faberry.”

Lauren: “Faberry”?

Gretchen: Which does have this nice B overlap. Because remember if two words have a sound in common, you can overlap them at that common sound from “Fabray” and “Berry” to “Faberry.” She used this poll to argue for, okay, “What are the criteria that people are using to figure out whether a combination feels satisfying or not?” One of those is pronunciation, but another one of those is “Does the spelling seem to correspond to that?” using English’s notoriously irregular spelling system.

Lauren: So, that stuck, and they stopped being called “quiche.”

Gretchen: Apparently, yeah.

Lauren: So good.

Gretchen: No more “quiche.”

Lauren: The playfulness of blends fits into their origin in a lot of ways. People have been playing around with this way of doing things in English off and on for a long time. As we said, definitely, the 20th Century was the rise of the portmanteau, but Lewis Carroll is generally credited with making them something quite popular with his 1872 poem “The Jabberwocky.”

Gretchen: So, “Jabberwocky” starts, “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: / All mimsy were the borogroves, / And the mome raths outgrabe.” This is a poem of mostly nonsense words in between normal English function words like “the” and “and.” You can tell what they’re supposed to do, but you don’t actually know what a “borogrove” or a “rath” or a “slithy tove” looks like.

Lauren: Some of these words were the combination of two other words.

Gretchen: Right. So, “slithy” is from “sly” and “filthy.”

Lauren: That’s interesting because I pronounce it as /slaɪði/.

Gretchen: Oh, I mean, apparently Lewis Carroll wants people to say /slaɪði/. I just looked at it and said /slɪθi/ because that’s what it looked like to me, which is, again, an example of how English orthography is not necessarily a guide to how to actually pronounce something. This shows up in portmanteaus a lot. He also really wanted it to be /gæɹ̩ ænd gɪmbl̩ ɪn ðə wɛɪb/ but like, I instinctively pronounce that /d͡ʒæɹ̩ ænd d͡ʒɪmbl̩/, so you know, this is one of the things that happens with coining a word is that you don’t necessarily retain control of it.

Lauren: What’s really interesting is that some of his portmanteaus from the poem have stuck. So, “chortle,” which is generally considered a blend of “chuckle” and “snort,” has become a word that has its own life outside of “Jabberwocky” the poem now.

Gretchen: Carroll called these words “portmanteau words” because a “portmanteau” was, at the time, a relatively commonly used word in English to refer to a briefcase or a travelling case or a bag for clothes or other necessities and, originally, from French meaning a coat carrier, to carry a coat. The idea was, for him, that it was two meanings packed up into one word as if you put them in a little suitcase together.

Lauren: It’s so funny that we’ve kept the meaning of the word for words and not for transporting clothing.

Gretchen: It kind of is. I find – like, the technical linguistic term is “blend,” which is a very bland choice of like, “Okay, we’ve blended these two words together.” “Portmanteau” is interesting but also a bit obscure because we don’t use that word for suitcases anymore. We can call them “suitcase words,” I guess, but that also seems a little bit weird.

Lauren: I was devastated to discover that “portmanteau” is not actually a portmanteau. It’s long enough, and it has the feeling that it could be a blend of words, but it’s just actually a compound in French of like, “port,” “carry,” and “manteau,” “coat.” Disappointingly not a portmanteau.

Gretchen: I love it when words like this for, especially, silly linguistic phenomena are themselves examples of the type of thing they’re trying to describe. What if you could make a name for blends or portmanteaus that is itself a combination of two words? I dunno. “Blerd” for “blend word.”

Lauren: Aw, it’s hard when your portmanteau creates a word that is a word already. We have “blurred,” so that’s probably not –

Gretchen: That’s true.

Lauren: Or it just sounds terrible saying “wordbination.”

Gretchen: “Worbination,” “werbinate” – hmm.

Lauren: “Word” and “combine” don’t actually have anything in common. Trying to smoosh them together is an exercise in failure. It doesn’t help that “word” and “blend” are both words that are very short.

Gretchen: What are some other words that are related to words that are longer?

Lauren: I guess if you had a lot of blends – because they create a lot of utility in the way that we speak – you could say that a group of blends is a “flexicon.”

Gretchen: Ooo, like a “flexible lexicon.” It’s got this nice little “lex” combination there.

Lauren: I think I’m definitely stretching what could be relative to referencing a portmanteau word.

Gretchen: Yeah. And a “flexicon,” it’s a satisfying word as itself, but it doesn’t transparently connect to the meaning of a blended word or a smooshed together word or a combined word. I guess we have to keep calling them “portmanteaus” and “blends” because there isn’t a better self-defining option, but I wish there was.

Lauren: Do you know another word that’s a portmanteau word?

Gretchen: Many, but it sounds like you have one in mind.

Lauren: “Lingthusiasm.”

Gretchen: [Laughs] Oh, hey, of course it is! So, our podcast, in case you hadn’t noticed this from the byline is a combination of “linguistics” plus “enthusiasm.”

Lauren: It’s a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.

Gretchen: We sure are. I think we did an okay job at coming up with this blend, but I will say it is a little bit hard to pronounce.

Lauren: It definitely writes better than it speaks.

Gretchen: Yeah, it writes better, but when I’ve tried to be on other podcasts or tell people about podcasts, I’m like “ＬＩＮＧ – ＴＨＵＳＩＡＳＭ.” I have to say it very carefully because having the /ŋ/ before the /θ/ is just sort of a lot.

Lauren: Yeah, that /ŋ/ is right on the back of your mouth, and /θ/ is just tucked in at the teeth there, so you’re moving really far through the mouth.

Gretchen: It’s ironic that, as a linguistics podcast, we have a name that is linguistically objectively difficult to say.

Lauren: What I enjoy about it, Gretchen, is it lets us see the different ways that people deal with this. Some people hyper-articulate and hit both the /ŋ/ and the /θ/. Some people just don’t even bother sending their tongue all the way back for that /ŋ/ sound, and instead just pronounce it something like /lɪnθʊziæsm/ or /lɪmfʊziæsm/ – I quite like that.

Gretchen: Or sometimes people introduce a bit of a K sound or a G sound in between to provide a transition the way that sometimes you hear people say /hæmpstɹ̩/ as “HAMP-STER” with a P even though there isn’t originally, etymologically a P there, but you can produce a P in /hæmpstɹ̩/ to help you say it. You can have like /lɪŋkθʊziæsm/, like give it a bit of a K there. All right, I’ll take it. It’s an interesting, fun linguistics experiment that we’re doing on everybody.

Lauren: The great thing is that this way that people either create that K by taking the /θ/ back a little bit or create a /n/ instead of a /ŋ/ and bring the tongue forward, this is a very common type of sound change process that creates another kind of smooshing.

Gretchen: This is our second kind of linguistic smooshing which is often happening within a word but sometimes happening between words when they’re said very close together and making the sounds more similar to each other.

Lauren: This is a process known as “assimilation,” which is a very useful, does-what-it-says word when it comes to linguistic sound processes.

Gretchen: “Assimilation,” as in the sounds become more similar to each other.

Lauren: Yeah. Not a great word in other contexts.

Gretchen: No, it has rather unfortunate social implications, doesn’t it.

Lauren: Yeah. People assimilation – not great. Sound assimilation – super common.

Gretchen: Very common. Really in, I think, basically all of the languages, at least languages that are actually being used by humans who have bodies in this day and age.

Lauren: We are efficient.

Gretchen: If you are learning to cook or something, and you’re a new cook, you’re gonna take your knife and chop the carrots in a very slow and awkward and clumsy process, whereas if you see a video of someone who’s very professional and they’re just like [chopping sounds] and doing this very efficient, smooth, no-wasted-movements process for chopping their onions or whatever, that’s what you’re doing with your tongue when you’re making the sounds just a little bit more similar to each other in order to make them a little bit easier to produce.

Lauren: You get these really interesting consistencies in the way that sounds get smooshed together.

Gretchen: Because we’re working with bodies that have very similar constraints. One of my favourite examples of linguistic assimilation is what happens with sounds like M and N in some contexts. Let me give you some words and tell me what they have in common.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: I have “inactive.” “inedible,” “imperfect,” “imbalance,” “independent,” “instable,” and “incurious.”

Lauren: They all start with I. I want to say they all have a prefix that means the same thing like “not.” You’re not edible; you’re not stable; you’re not cautious. They’re basically the same prefix. Some are N, and some are M.

Gretchen: Sometimes, we write this prefix like “im-” – “imperfect,” “imbalance,” “immaterial,” “immovable.” There’s loads of them. Sometimes, we write this prefix like “in-” like in “inactive,” “inedible,” and “incautious,” “infrequent.” But we pronounce it slightly differently, especially with that “IMperfect,” where it gets an M, versus “INdependent,” where it goes an N. This is because of the next sound.

Lauren: So, “imperfect,” we have a P. “Independent,” we have a D. P, like an M, is made with the lips, and D, like an N, is made just behind the teeth.

Gretchen: Exactly. In writing, we make this distinction between /m/ – M and N – but there’s actually a few more subtle differences in terms of how the sounds are made between “infrequent,” which you could say as /infɹikwɛnt/. But often, people actually move that N a little bit closer and pronounce it with the teeth on the lips as well as the F – /in̪fɹikwɛnt/.

Lauren: /in̪fɹikwɛnt/.

Gretchen: Or /in̪vəlɪd/.

Lauren: Congrats to everyone joining us on public transport or while out for a walk just going “Fuh-ree-kwent,” “Innnn-frekwent.”

Gretchen: Yeah, please make some sounds and make people next to you look at you a little bit funny. It’s fine. Welcome to the club. Or, you know, make it with your mouth and don’t articulate if you have to. There’s this /in̪fɹikwɛnt/ – and the same with something like /iŋkɑʃʌs/ or /iŋkəɹiʌs/, /iŋkəɹɛɪʃʌs/ where you tend to move the nasal sound – the N – to be more of an /ŋ/ like in “sing,” move it back to the same place that you’re constricting your tongue as with the /k/ sound – /iŋkɑʃʌs/. It’s like “ink-cautious” – “ing-cautious, “ing-conceivable.”

Lauren: It’s so interesting some of these turn up in the writing system, and some of them don’t and completely escape our notice.

Gretchen: The M is right there in writing, and so you have to remember, “Oh, you have to write it different,” but the pronunciation is right there and straightforward. Then the N in “incautious” or “incurious” is not there in the writing, but you know to pronounce it that way because it’s just easier to do even if no one’s actually told you. You’re just like, “Oh, well, that’s easier.” There’s a few that are just totally in the writing system. You also have words like “illegible” or “irreplaceable.”

Lauren: Because we’re just decided instead of saying, “IN-legible” or “IN-replaceable,” it’s just easier to make that one sound.

Gretchen: That’s just way too hard. These words – the “in-” prefix in English – goes back to Latin, so you find words like this in a whole bunch of languages that have gotten these words from Latin because already in Latin they were like, “Yeah, you just have to make it more similar. That’s what you do.”

Lauren: It’s not just in these prefixes that this assimilation happens because we saw with “LING-thusiasm,” it’s that same kind of thing with the nasal moving to accommodate for the next sound. Or my favourite, which is if you listen to pretty much anyone say the word “handbag” in rapid speech, a lot of the time it’ll become “HAM-bag,” as in –

Gretchen: The bag that you keep ham.

Lauren: The place where you store your ham. Mmm.

Gretchen: Mmm.

Lauren: But it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll be talking about ham storage situations at the same time as you’re talking about the purse that you grab every day, and so we don’t actually pay attention to the distinction because we normally don’t need to.

Gretchen: My favourite example of this is in the word “input,” which is not from the kind of “in-” that means “not,” because it’s not the opposite of “put” – you can either PUT something or you can IN-put it – it’s from the thing that you “put in,” where this other “in” means “inside of” and is not the same thing. But because it’s so hard to say “IN-put,” most of the time in rapid speech, people are actually saying /ɪmpʌt/.

Lauren: I feel like I often type “imput.”

Gretchen: Yeah, me, too! And then they underline it in the red squiggles, and I’m like, “No! C’mon, you know what I meant. This is the better way to spell it anyway.” There’s a bunch of Latin prefixes that do it like the Latin prefix “com-” as in “with.” You have “companion.”

Lauren: With an M.

Gretchen: Someone you break bread with – “com-pan.” There’s the M before the P. But “collect” – that “coll-” – the double L – is still a nasal that’s just been [whooshing noise] made to be like the L.

Lauren: Really? I’m so mad right now.

Gretchen: And “consume” – there it is as an N.

Lauren: Uh-huh, it’s not “com-sume” because that’s too hard to say.

Gretchen: Even “coordinate,” before a vowel, you just drop the following nasal entirely in that case.

Lauren: I’m also angry.

Gretchen: They’re all the same prefix. It just means “with.”

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: Same with the Greek prefix, which comes to us via Latin, “syn-” meaning “together.” So, “symphony,” where that M becomes like the P-H sound, the /f/, /sɪmfəni/. And “syntax.”

Lauren: As in –

Gretchen: All the same “syn-”.

Lauren: “Syn-” and “sym-” in “symphony” and “syntax” are the same.

Gretchen: They’re all the same “syn-”.

Lauren: Ugh, this thing with nasals turns up all over the place – and not just in English and Latin and Greek. We have links to papers in the shownotes to Jakarta Indonesian, Arsi-Bale Afan Oromo, and also Akan, which is a language of Guana. There are so many languages where this is a super common process.

Gretchen: This is basically if I found a language that had a nasal and then another consonant, and they didn’t assimilate, I’d be sort of surprised at this point.

Lauren: Mm-hmm. It’s so common that the phrase “homorganic nasal assimilation” is just one of those phrases that you pick up, and it sticks with you because it turns up again and again.

Gretchen: I like “homorganic nasal assimilation” because it seems really complicated, but you can break it down etymologically in a way that’s really satisfying. You have “hom-organic,” so that’s the “homo-” prefix meaning “same” and then the “same organ.” So, it’s the same part of the mouth – whether it’s the lips or just behind the teeth or towards the back of the roof of the mouth or various other places. You want to have the nasal sound be at the same spot in the mouth as the sound that’s coming after it.

Lauren: “Homorganic nasal assimilation.”

Gretchen: It’s really nice.

Lauren: Very satisfying. Of course, not the only process of assimilation. There are a lot of these processes that happen. They happen with vowels getting more similar to each other.

Gretchen: We did a whole episode about the kind of assimilation that happens with C and G before different vowels, like why C and G seem to come in hard and soft versions, unlike most of the other consonants, because they tend to be affected and made more similar to the next vowel that’s coming after them.

Lauren: And rest assured that signers as well as speakers are good at being efficient when it comes to articulation. You get assimilation in signed languages as well.

Gretchen: There’s a really interesting video from 1913 – which has got to be some of the older videos of signed languages – about this signer named George Veditz in his film called, “The Preservation of American Sign Language.” It shows him signing the old ASL word “remember.” In this video from over a hundred years ago, he’s signing it starting with an open hand at the forehand, and then the hand would come down and close into a fist, and the thumb would touch the top of the other thumb from the non-dominant hand. Now, it’s just the thumb at the forehead to the thumb touching the other hand, both in fists the whole time. You can see videos of this. We’ll link to it in the description.

Lauren: It’s such a charming old video. He just has this olde-y time-y – the footage is old, but he also does this little head nod while he’s doing it. It’s incredibly charming. But as you said, you go from having the open hand to a fist with the thumb, and now, over a century of assimilating the handshape, people just go from the thumb at the forehead to the thumb down at the other thumb.

Gretchen: It’s an example of making it more efficient by not changing the movement midway through the sign.

Lauren: You see a lot of these changes in signed articulation where people will just keep the same handshape, or they won’t change location for a sign where the position of the body might have moved in an older version of it to keep things efficient.

Gretchen: I think it’s neat to look at the sign examples because, when we write words down, it’s not always clear that M and P have this particular relationship of both being produced with the lips. You have to go back and think about that as a speaker. A lot of sounds happen inside the mouth so that can’t really see them very well. You can see the signs becoming more similar to each other in a way that’s obscured for us by writing systems sometimes.

Lauren: Writing systems are really holding us back when it comes to thinking about assimilation because they’re so conservative. We really lose a lot as written language users when it comes to keeping track with changes that are happening in speech but don’t necessarily reflect well in the writing system.

Gretchen: Sometimes, we do start writing words in ways that correspond more closely to how they’re being spoken. I’m thinking of words like “gonna” and “hafta,” which have been respelled from “going to” and “have to.” I don’t think very many people at all say, “I HAVE to go to the store.” You might say, “I have TWO donuts,” but “I HAF to go to the store.”

Lauren: But you definitely can’t write “gonna” or “hafta” in a school essay.

Gretchen: No, they’re not part of this formal register, but they’re very much part of the texting or social media or informal written register, and there are relatively consistent ways of writing them even though they’re not formalised. Like, “gonna” tends to be written with two Ns, “gotta” with two Ts, “wanna” also with two Ns. They have these consistent ways of spelling them even though they’re part of this informal writing register.

Lauren: It’s interesting to watch this little “to” here, this function word, which, if you say it by itself, you get the full word.

Gretchen: “Going to.”

Lauren: But when it is in these quicker phrases, you can see that it’s getting squished into the previous word. That sound is being assimilated, and that vowel “to,” which is very much at the back of the mouth with the tongue, but it gets more and more towards the middle, and the lips get less and less rounded as it becomes less articulated.

Gretchen: Yeah, it gets more and more of a neutral, default /ə/ vowel – the schwa vowel – which is the least extreme of anything your mouth can be doing. It’s the most efficient vowel that you just say if you’re making an “uh” – like making a grunt sound or an “uh,” a neutral sound. It gets made to be the easiest thing to do because these words are super high frequency, we’re saying them all the time, and you don’t really need that added information of what else could it be in that context. So, “going to” becomes “gon tuh” becomes “gon na.”

Lauren: This reduction that constantly goes on is part of how language gets used. It’s like a path that we continue to wear down, and things become more assimilated through that phonetic process, and they start to lose particularly clear meaning, and then you create this ability for the language to generate things that eventually just become part of the grammar or part of a single word through this smooshing.

Gretchen: It’s a trajectory from very concrete words to very abstract, grammaticalised words, so from something that means like, “go,” as in physically move to a place, versus something that just means a generalised, abstract concept of “future.” So, “I’m going to the store” is physically moving to place, whereas “I’m gonna bake a cake” is a notion of future that doesn’t mean that I’m going to walk to the cake in the same way.

Lauren: I love it when you eventually get to it’s totally fine to say, “I am going to come,” and it’s just like, if you think about them in their semantic sense, it’s a contradiction, but this happens across languages. The future is often created in this way. If a language didn’t have a future tense, it will create one through this process.

Gretchen: Or sometimes create a second, bonus, extra future.

Lauren: You can never have too much future. You get this reduction in the sound. You get this reduction in how much meaning is in a word, and it becomes less concrete and more abstract.

Gretchen: Or sort of, yeah, a reduction in terms of how much concrete meaning but an enhancement in terms of the ability to express more abstract concepts.

Lauren: Well, yeah, it becomes a very useful part of something that becomes more grammatical.

Gretchen: My favourite example of this process and how cyclic it is is the French word “aujourd'hui.” “Aujourd'hui” in French means “today.”

Lauren: Great.

Gretchen: That’s just what it means. If you look at it, and you have a little bit of French, you might say, okay, “aujourd'hui,” we could break that down. The “au” means “at the” or “on the” – itself smooshing from “à le,” but we’re gonna ignore that. The “jour” part means “day.” Great. Itself also a smooshing from something in Latin, but we’re also gonna ignore that.

Lauren: Yeah, it’s smooshing all the way down.

Gretchen: It’s smooshing all the way down. There’s really so much smooshing smooshed into this one word. The “d’” – the D + apostrophe – is from “de,” which is itself, again, smooshing – it means “of.”

Lauren: Oh, I’m shocked.

Gretchen: So, these are fairly well known French words if you break them down. And then you have this last part which is spelled H-U-I. It’s pronounced /wi/ – “Aujourd'hui.”

Lauren: I’m gonna guess, Gretchen, that that’s been smooshed down from something.

Gretchen: Oh, Lauren, you’re so right. “Hui” /wi/ – which sounds like the French word for “yes” (oui) but is not – is an obsolete word that also means “today,” which is what the whole thing means.

Lauren: Amazing. So, the word “today” in French, if you break it down etymologically, means “on the day of today.”

Gretchen: But we don’t even need to stop there.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: Because “hui” comes from Latin “hodie.”

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: Which is a contraction of “hac die” meaning “on this day.”

Lauren: “On this day.”

Gretchen: So, “aujourd'hui” – “au jour de hodie” – is literally “on the day of on this day.”

Lauren: Amazing.

Gretchen: It’s got two days in it. It’s not today – well, it is two-day – but it’s “two,” T-W-O.

Lauren: It is extremely today.

Gretchen: It is extremely today. It is extra much today because it’s like you had a path that started eroding, and so you put some extra paving stones in to sure it up and added an extra “day” so you wouldn’t get confused about the word “oui” that means “yes.”

Lauren: It’s stories like this and it’s the realisation that language is constantly doing this that makes me feel really comforted by the kind of processes of use. Because it’s not a wearing out of language; it’s a lovingly using and laying down – and, you know, our portmanteaus today will become concrete words, and then they might get eroded down or re-blended or used again to create new, what could be grammatical forms. It all just continues on across history. It’s easy to see when you look across time how language continues to just get loved and used and worn.

Gretchen: It’s like how we can forget that “chortle” started off as a joke word from Lewis Carroll in this poem, and we’re like, “Well, that’s just a word that means a thing.” It’s not particularly a portmanteau. It’s just a word that I have. And we could then re-portmanteau it into another word and keep doing this process over and over again and building things up and smooshing them together and then building up more stuff and smooshing it back together. It’s a really exciting process of making stuff. I like how smooshing reminds us of the physicality of language and how, when you say a word that’s been smooshed, your body – your tongue, your hands – are tracing a path that so many other people’s bodies have also traced. It’s like when you’re walking down a set of stone stairs that have this dent in the middle from this very soft groove of everyone steps in it over centuries. You can feel that you’re going where some else was going. When you’re using a smooshed word, you’re participating in this language pathway that has been part of so many people’s bodies for so many generations.

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Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all of the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode at lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including the IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like our “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts and aesthetic IPA posters – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet.

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Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

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