Glottal Stops

Have you ever heard of a glottal stop? Probably not. But it's very likely that you have heard a glottal stop, since they are actually very frequent in English. You've probably never really noticed them, or just taken them for granted, but glottal stops are actually important sounds in the languages of the world, and often used creatively. Let's talk a little bit about glottal stops today.

If you've seen my IPA page, you'll know that a stop is what happens when you have a build-up of air that is suddenly released. The "glottal" part tells you that this is formed by the glottis, also known as the vocal cords. In a glottal stop, the vocal cords close, air builds up behind them, then the cords open quickly, resulting in a burst of air. It can be hard to hear the glottal stop, but think about the exclamation "uh-oh!" There's a sound between the "uh" and the "oh", isn't there? The two vowels don't flow seamlessly into each other. That sound in the middle is a glottal stop! The symbol for a glottal stop is ʔ.

But wait, there's more! In English, if you start a sentence with a word that starts with a vowel, there's a very good chance that that vowel will be preceded by a glottal stop. It's not uncommon at all for words with vowels at the beginning to have a glottal stop before them. If you speak American English, words like "button" and "mountain" have a glottal stop in them. "bu-n" [bʌʔn] and "moun-n [maʊʔn]." Some varieties of London English have Ts in the middle of words turn into glottal stops, so you have "bo-l" instead of "bottle." In most varieties of English, words ending in a vowel and then a stop have a glottal stop before the stop. This is known as "glottal reinforcement." To wrap up our list of examples, if you have a hiatus - when one word ends with a vowel and the next starts with the same vowel - a glottal stop can be used to break up that hiatus. So if you say "the eel" [ði il], that can be realized as [ði ʔil].

Some languages take glottal stops to the next level. They include glottal stops in their phonemic inventory. This means that glottal stops are considered sounds like "t" or "s" or "p" and words can be distinguished based on whether they have a glottal stop or not. This includes languages like Persian, Arabic, and Hawaiian.

Examples of Glottal Stops

Because glottal stops are not phonemic in English (it is not a sound in English the way it is in Arabic), most people are not aware of what they are or what they are called. Nevertheless, glottal stops are often used for effect.

In the movie "The Social Network," Mark Zuckerberg is fooling around during a business meeting. He's making some clicks (we'll talk about clicks in a different post). The client asks him what he's doing. Mark shrugs and says "some kind of glottal stop." Unfortunately, not a single one of those sounds was a glottal stop. It is still interesting to note that they chose to have him say "glottal stop" - did it sound cooler than "lateral click?" Did someone confuse a click with a glottal stop? Did the actor not understand how to make a glottal stop and just make clicks instead? This is a minor goof that has bothered me since I first watched this movie.

There are plenty of pop songs where a series of vowels separated by glottal stops constitutes the hook. You have Singles Ladies' "whoa-uh-oh, wuh-uh-uh, wuh-uh, oh, wuh-uh-oh" and Bad Romance's "ra, ra, a-a-a."

Sometimes glottal stops appear in unexpected places. In a live performance of "Wake Me Up When September Ends" from the live album "Bullet in a Bible," the lead singer of Green Day says "as my memor-y [mɛmɝʔi] rests." This is a pretty odd place to put a glottal stop, right in the middle of a word like that. He says it both times the line comes up as well. Oddly enough, he does not do this on the studio recording of the song.

Are Glottal Stops Harmful?

If you're a singer or an actor, you may have heard a vocal coach say that glottal stops are actually harmful for your voice. Here is an example of this attitude:

In drama school, however, I was told that glottal stopping was bad bad bad. My voice and speech teacher warned of the dangers of glottal stopping. “It can shred your voice,” he said. “It’s the worst thing you can do to your vocal cords.” In fact, he rarely referred to it as a glottal stop, but rather applied the scarier-sounding term, Glottal Attack. Yikes! And my voice and teach professor wasn’t alone among those in the voice and speech training community. Here is what renowned vocal coach Patsy Rodenburg has to say about the matter in her The Actor Speaks: "A compromise is necessary if the accent has qualities in it that can damage the voice … certain constrictions naturally present in some accents, could produce vocal abuse; glottal attack, for instance. You could speculate that native speakers of these accents have adapted sufficiently not to suffer this abuse." (Source)

A glottal onset bursts open the vocal folds, creating an almost grunt-like noise before the sound of the desired note. A glottal onset leads to a pressed sound (“pressed phonation”). Continued use of a hard glottal onset at high dynamic levels can potentially harm the vocal folds. (Source)

Is there any credence to the notion that high-pressure glottal stops can harm the vocal folds? First, notice that they are being specific. They are talking about glottal onsets (this is probably what "glottal attack" is referring to, since "attack" refers to the beginning of a sound wave). If you'll look back to our example about vowels, in English phrases starting with a vowel often begin with a glottal stop. This is what they are referring to. Glottal stops at the ends of words ("but"), or in a medial position ("button"), are unlikely to have enough pressure behind them to have a singing teacher worry that they would hard one's voice.

Ben T. Smith at Dialect Blog suggests that the reason vocal coaches discourage the glottal stop is due to classism. Working class South English accents, such as Estuary English, use glottal stops more frequently compared to standard varieties of English like Received Pronunciation. Smith suggests that distaste towards stigmatized accents is more to blame than any actual risk of vocal harm. He also notes that many languages all around the world use glottal stops regularly in multiple positions and have rich singing traditions. Arabic is a noteworthy one, as there is a long Arabic singing tradition and varieties of Arabic use the glottal stop. As far as I know, there is no epidemic of Arabic singers experiencing damaged vocal cords due to glottal onsets.

We shouldn't dismiss the notion entirely, though. Air coming in at high pressure puts strain on the vocal cords, and that is known to be harmful. It is not inconceivable that repeated use of very harsh glottal onsets at a high dynamic level (that is, loud volume) could contribute to vocal cord damage. Glottal onsets on their own, though, should not be any reason to worry.

Some vocal coaches worry about the quality of the glottal onset sound:

The ‘trick’ to executing an effective and healthy glottal stop is very much like that for staccato notes. Glottal adduction cannot be overly firm and the subglottal air pressure cannot be too high, or else the glottal stop will be ‘sluggish’ (instead of crisp and rapid) and the sound will be explosive and harsh. In other words, the throat must remain ‘open’ (rather than constricted and hyperfunctional) and the breath must be held back slightly with the inspiratory muscles (rather than forced out rapidly).

The singer first needs to develop consistent balance in the onset (‘attack’) of sound before attempting glottal stops. This can be accomplished through simple onset-release exercises performed on single notes, use of the ‘inhalare la voce’ [...] concept and the appoggio (the inspiratory hold whereby subglottal pressure is kept lower by resisting the premature ascent of the diaphragm). Work on staccato is often a logical next step. (The glottal stop requires a slightly longer and firmer glottal closure and closed quotient of the vocal folds than staccato, which in turn generates higher subglottal pressure, but both skills require control and balance between glottal adduction and the breath pressure.) (Source).

It is true that not all stops are created equal. Sometimes when we make a stop, we release more air compared to other times. Other times, less air is built up and it is released more weakly. The folks at "SingWise" are not suggesting that the issue is that glottal stops will ruin your voice, but rather that "poorly performed" glottal stops are stylistically undesirable for a singer.

Overall, the average person has no reason to worry about glottal stops ruining their voice. There are different reasons for avoiding them, like wanting to avoid stigmatized features of an accent or avoiding "sloppy" sounds when singing, and under unusual circumstances - like singing at high volume with poor technique and a lot of air pressure - it's possible that glottal stops could harm your vocal cords. If you are a singer or an actor, work with your vocal coach to use less high-intensity techniques to project your voice. Otherwise, carry on!

Note: I do not have access to medical journals (indeed, I have limited access to academic journals in general), so if you are aware of any scientific studies on the effects of glottal stops on the vocal cords in different situations, I would greatly appreciate any links in that direction.

Whomst'd've guessed it?

One of my favorite memes of 2017 has been ‘whomst’. Now ‘whomst’ started appearing early 2017, so it’s basically decrepit in meme years, but since we’re nearing the end of the year I figured it would be fun to look back at this language-based meme.

‘whomst’ is a meme that involves using the word ‘whomst’ instead of ‘who’ to appear intelligent. It has some overlap with the meme ‘me, an intellectual’ which also involves fake intelligence, and the glowing eyes memes, where ‘whomst’ has contractions added to it to become even longer and ‘better’.

One thing I have not seen anyone talk about is the form of the word ‘whomst.’ The consensus is ‘whomst’ is a fancier version of ‘who,’ but very little discussion has been given to why the fancy version of ‘who’ is ‘whomst’ and not ‘whont’ or ‘wholli’ or any other variation. And the truth is, there is very much a reason behind ‘whomst’ taking the form it took.

Hypercorrection

Ladies and gentlemen and members of the audience, this is the phenomenon to blame. The entire motivation for there even being a ‘whomst’ meme, the scourge of all prescriptivists and tool of all station-climbers... hypercorrection. Hypercorrection refers to a phenomenon where someone misuses a construction or word in an attempt to appear more "correct." The seeds of hypercorrection are planted in grammar school, when teachers tell students things like “me and Jane” is incorrect and it should actually be “Jane and I.” (Of course, those of us who study linguistics know that such value judgments are actually arbitrary and not logically consistent or even historically sound… but that’s a topic for another post). English teachers rarely, if ever, know anything about linguistics, and so their understanding of English comes from a different framework. They make statements about how some constructions are unacceptable - even though they sound perfectly normal in colloquial English - and that ‘Standard English’ is the only true way to speak English.

The problem is they often fail to actually teach why the "wrong" form doesn’t work. To use our earlier example, ‘me and Jane’. Let’s look at the pronoun. (The ordering is some weird stuff we won’t get into). Pronouns in English have these two forms, the ‘nominative’ and the ‘accusative.’ The nominative is used when a pronoun is the subject of a verb. This form is ‘I, you, he, she, it, we, they.’ You can say ‘I ran,’ but you can’t say *‘me ran’ in most varieties of English. The accusative case is used when a pronoun is the object of a verb - in other words, when something is being done to the pronoun. You can say ‘I loved him’ but not *‘I love he’.

In Standard English, pronouns in a subject position (the pronoun is the one ‘doing’ something) must be in the nominative case, even when they are joined with another word by using 'and'. So ‘me and Jane ran’ is incorrect in Standard English because *‘me ran’ is unacceptable. ‘Jane and I ran’ is okay because you can say 'I ran.' Now look at ‘He loved Jane and me.’ This one is okay because if we remove Jane, you get ‘he loved me,’ which is grammatical. *’He loved Jane and I’ is not a good sentence because ‘He loved I’ is a bad sentence.

Extra credit: who is correct, Todd or Scott? (spoiler: Todd's version is awkward but the case makes sense because "I and he" is the subject. Scott's "he and me" mixes nominative and accusative case, which is a no-no in Standard English!)

Did your teacher ever teach you any of this? Or did they just say ‘you can’t say me and X, it must be X and I’? Most teachers just broadly tell you that something is wrong and then move along through their long list of arbitrary rules. This leaves people confused and they come up with their own explanations - "'X and me' is wrong, but ‘X and I’ is correct." This leads to constructions that are actually not grammatical in Standard English, like *’between you and I.’ In Standard English, prepositions take the accusative case. It’s ‘with me,’ not *‘with I’. The form should be ‘between you and me’, but if you were never explained how this works, you’re just going to find every instance of ‘me and X’ and replace it with ‘X and I.’ This is a hypercorrection - when you go too far in trying to be right that you end up wrong. Hypercorrections are one of the ways you can spot someone who is not actually comfortable using standard language but is trying to appear as though they do.

The same applies to ‘whom.’ Most people know ‘whom’ exists, but ‘whom’ is virtually extinct in most varieties of English. Unlike the ‘you and I’ example, most teachers won’t even talk about it! Now the reality is that ‘whom’ is simply the accusative form of ‘who’. If you can replace who with a pronoun in the accusative case, you can use ‘whom’. “Who did he love?” “He loved her.” -> “Whom did he love?” If you can replace ‘who’ with the nominative, then don’t change anything. “Who went to the store?” “They went to the store.” The key: whom can never go in the subject position.

Zac Efron demonstrates the social consequences of misusing who and whom.

All of this is lost on people who know there is a word ‘whom’ and that it is used by well-educated people. The assumption is that ‘whom’ is a ‘fancy’ or ‘more correct’ version of ‘who’ and so you get ungrammatical sentences like *‘whom went to the store?’ This is a dead giveaway that a person is not actually well versed on Standard English grammar and is trying hard to look smarter than they really are. This is part one of ‘whomst’. But we’re not content to stop there - there’s an -st there.

The -st

Think about ‘among’ and ‘while.’ In the United States, these are the standard versions. However, there are variants: ‘amongst’ and ‘whilst’. Now, people hate it when two words mean exactly the same thing, so they try to come up with some distinction between them to justify having two different words. ‘Grammar nerds’ will argue over when it is appropriate to use ‘among’ or ‘amongst,’ and people come up with the most bizarre and ahistorical justifications like ‘among is for people and amongst is for inanimate objects’ (I've actually seen this one). The reality is that ‘amongst’ and ‘whilst’ mean exactly the same as their shorter brethren; they are simply older and rarer. If you only encounter ‘amongst’ in literature, though, you may be forgiven for thinking that ‘amongst’ is the ‘literary variant’ - and the logic goes "literary = more educated." This leads to some people falsely saying ‘amongst’ is the ‘proper’ form and ‘among’ is the colloquial!

As you’ll notice, both of these words comprise a well known word (among/while) and what appears to be a suffix, -st. By analogy, couldn’t you just add ‘-st’ to make a word fancy and literary? What if we added it to an already fancy and literary word like… whom? We’d have the most educated word in the world! And so it appears ‘whomst' was born by analogy.

Size Matters

But the whomst meme doesn’t stop there! In many of the comics, ‘whomst’ is simply the first level. To reach true awakening, you must use ‘whomst’d’, or even ‘whomst’d’ve’. Wow, my eyes sure hurt from all this glowing.

This is a weird expansion of the word, because they are adding contractions. Whomst’d would therefore be ‘whomst had’ or ‘whomst would’. ‘Whomst’d’ve’ would be ‘whomst would have’. Contractions are usually considered informal, and double contractions like ‘who’d’ve’ are considered especially unfit for the written page by stodgy guardians of propriety. Why would adding contractions make ‘whomst’ an even more ‘fake intelligent’ word?

My theory - this has to do with the English belief that ‘long words’ are more ‘literary.’ Have you ever heard someone accuse someone else of using ‘big words’? ‘Big words’ refer to words that are usually found in books and are ‘long’. This is in comparison to normal words: lightning, not fulmination. It’s very unusual because this isn’t really a thing in other languages. In Spanish, there are plenty of common words that are long. Agglutinating languages like Turkish and Japanese add so many suffixes to words that almost every word in a normal sentence can be a long word!

The belief that longer word = literary word seems to have some correlation with the fact that the base of English vocabulary is of Germanic origin, while the ‘learned’ vocabulary is of Latin and Greek origin. The Germanic words are often monosyllabic, like ‘egg’ and ‘word’. The Latin words, meanwhile, have many syllables, like ‘deconstruction.’ The meanings of these words are transparent to people who speak Romance languages or Greek (de = to undo; construct = to build; -tion = make the verb into a noun), they are not transparent to English speakers without further explanation. The end result is that an association arises between how long a word is and how learned the user must be.
Now English does not have a ton of suffixes it can add on to ‘whomst’, but it does have contractions. In this way ‘whomst’d’ is longer than ‘whomst’ and ‘whomst’d’ve’ is even longer. You can see it get crazier and more nonsensical with stuff like ‘whomst’d’ve’ll’.

Ask Not For Whomst The Bell Tolls

The fun of this meme is that it’s totally silly - it mocks people who want to put on airs without actually going through the trouble of learning anything new. ‘Whomst’ is brilliant - I don’t know if the originator had -st in mind when coming up with it, but it just works so well by analogy with amongst. Unfortunately, memes have a lifespan, and it appears that ‘whomst’ is nearing its end. Farewell, brave linguistic meme. Whomst’d’ve ever expected you?

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Forensic Morphology & Zootopia

One of the motivating factors behind making this blog is that I often have these small observations about linguistic phenomena in song lyrics, movies, whatever, but none of my other social media are really fit for talking about this sort of observation. Twitter is too short to allow me to fully geek out, Tumblr too poorly designed, Facebook too "no one cares." I have no choice but to go Web 1.0 and make... an actual blog.

One of these observations came from the movie "Zootopia," which I may or may not have seen three times.  So our protagonist, the rabbit police officer Judy, sees a fox do something horrible and unbelievable - he walks into an ice cream shop. She gets her little fox pepper spray ready but when she walks in, she sees the fox, named Nick, is actually trying to buy a popsicle for his son but is being refused service by racist (speciesist?) elephants. She buys it for him because she believes she is a paragon of virtue and totally not prejudiced (the racially coded language of Zootopia could be its own post). Later on, she sees him and his "son" melting the red popsicle to make many other smaller popsicles, which he sells to lemming businessmen at a profit. His "son" collects the recycled popsicle sticks and they offer them as lumber to some kind of hamster construction company.

Here's the important part. Since the popsicles were red, the sticks were obviously stained red. The hamster questions this red color. Nick thinks a moment and then claims it's "redwood." A few minutes later, Judy angrily confronts him about his deception and tries to arrest him for health violations. He actually has all his permits in place, so he's done nothing illegal. She then says he committed fraud, by saying he was selling "redwood." He responds "yes, red wood. With a space in the middle. As in 'wood that is red.'" She has no response.

Except if Judy had taken a morphology class, she would've known that he did not, in fact, say "redwood." "Redwood" and "red wood" have different morphological properties which result in their being pronounced differently. "Redwood" is a compound of "red" and "wood." In English, compound words like this are pronounced with just one stress, and here the stress is on redwood. "Red wood," on the other hand, is an adjective modifying a noun. Since they are both independent morphological units, they each get stress. In IPA, we could represent this as ['ɹɛdwʊd] vs ['rɛd 'wʊd]. In other words, Judy was correct that he was committing fraud, and Nick was lying about having said "red wood" as opposed to "redwood."

(Not convinced? Try a different pair, like "blackbird" and "black bird." Notice how in "black bird," bird gets just as much stress as "black" and there's also some sort of prosodic boundary marking that a different word has begun. In "blackbird," "bird" has a lower pitch than "black" and is a bit shorter in duration as well.)

Unfortunately, our heroine does not appear to have ever taken a morphology class, so she can't refute his linguistically unsound argument. A shame, because she even had a pen that can record audio, and she later uses this pen to record his speech and blackmail him into working for her (this time she gets him on tax evasion), so if she had been recording that conversation, this movie could've taken a different turn pretty early.

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