Speaking Naturally

During my time in Cape Town this past spring, I spent time auditing a course: Beginner's Xhosa. We learned a few songs, some basic phrases, and important elements of Xhosan language and culture: including, the all important clicks. I found clicks to be one of the most expressive, yet difficult elements to master of this complex language. They were rather fun, the fast pop and release of air, in a loud emphatic click, held a sense of satisfaction like no other. I had a friend, Sphu, who was Xhosan, and whenever we went out dancing, he would click along to the beat of the songs, emphasizing drops in the music, the same way English speakers might sing along or tap their feet while dancing. It was as though it was embedded in him- this knowledge of rhythm as it relates to music as it relates to language.

In the Kenstowicz article, Kenstowicz alludes to a set of underlying understandings that we, as native English speakers have, which allow us to interpret "writer" and "rider" as different words based on a long vowel that is present in "rider" and not "writer." This long vowel is not coded in the phonetic representation of the word "rider," but implicitly understood and performed by all native English speakers. These rules are engrained in us, known to us without us even consciously understanding them ourselves. Edward Sapir named these "collective phonetic illusions," which are effortless to us, to perform and understand. Just like Sphu clicking along to the music, it is something we learned from a young age, the music in our blood.

Gussenhoven, on the other hand, gives us an intense sense of detail regarding the physical processes of our language. How we produce friction, pitch, glottal stops, aspiration, and more, all based on the interaction and systematic use of our layrnx, mouth, lungs, etc. What strikes me as important about all of this however, is how amazing it is that we don't have to think about it. It happens naturally, the same as blinking or inhaling or exhaling comes naturally. That is, until, we try to work with a language that is not natural to us. In my Xhosa class, I had to learn to produce double articulations, which are not typically present in the english language (Gussenhoven mentions 'w' as a close approximant). The phrase "Ndiphilile" (I am well) is one of the first phrases you learn in Xhosa, and it requires that unfamiliar to the english mouth [nd] sound. Learning the various clicks, I had to learn the click that comes from the middle of your mouth, pushing air from the back of your mouth along the sides of your teeth, as in the word 'Xhosa.' I also learned the click that comes from pushing the tip of your tongue against the front roof of your mouth (the hard palate perhaps) for the word 'cela' or please. All of a sudden, I was working very hard, to produce sounds that my mouth is fully capable of, but was not trained from a young age to make. Listening to native speakers, their clicks were explosive and unexamined, they didn't think twice. They could hear and interpret subtle differences between clicks that my ears had not been trained to understand. That is the nature of underlying understandings of native speakers, which are inherently tough to codify, as examined in the Kenstowicz article.

Phonology seems to attempt to codify what is effortless to native speakers, to understand systems so deeply engrained in our everyday habits and perception that it would be hard for us to explain to another what the rules are of our language (i.e. it would be hard to explain the difference in sound between "writer" and "rider" for the common English speaker). In Taoism, this sort of effortless action is referred to as "wu-wei" or "non action," wherein the mind and body are able to perform some action by virtue of relaxing and not striving. It is difficult to constrain the nuances of language into rigid phonetic rules, constructed by the conscious intellect, when the act of language seems to fall much more closely into "wu-wei": the beautiful thing is we don't have to think about it. But, it is interesting all the same, and I am curious to see how these abstractions relate to further study of language and thought.