One of the courses for me this year is Approaches to Diversity. Every week we get a little taste from another field of Linguistics! In our first week we had Sociolinguistics by the wonderful Prof. Ingrid Tieken, which was followed by Computational Linguistics (or, well, the name on the syllabus was complexity) introduced to us newbies by Dr. Cremers (another awesome human being). Last week, we had a course on Language Contact by two teachers who both have Maarten as their first name!
This week.. We are introduced (or, reintroduced) to Phonology, the study of sound systems. And all of a sudden, I missed my old Linguistics classes in my English Bachelor at Leiden University (where I am now doing my Masters as well). While the professor, Marc van Oosterdorp, was off rambling (as professors and teacher or anyone that is somewhat older than 30/40 tends to do), I was thinking of Star Wars again.
But then again, when do I not think about the awesomeness that is the Force. The professor was talking about the battling forces in our head trying to determine between faithfulness and markedness. For those that don’t know what this means, look it up ^^.
Nah, Faitfulness is when you try to speak to the underlying form as much as possible and thus, enunciate as clearly as possible (well it is more than that but this is sufficient, I think). Marknedness is when we deviate from that faithfulness like devoicing a consonant that was voiced which is the case in Dutch when a word ends in a d. In English, this is not the case (or well there is final devoicing but not as much as there is in Dutch that it actually sounds like a /t/). In other words, the English are pretty faithful!
But to get back to my Star Wars thoughts, while the professor was talking about forces I wrote down: “The force is strong when speaking to your mom”. Oh! How I love assonance! As for an explanation to this quote, When we talk to people we feel comfortable with, we let our guard down in terms of pronunciation. We get lazy and start doing phonology.
So for those haters that are all: I hate phonology!
Too bad for you! ‘Cause you’re doin’ it evry day!
Luv.
May the Forces of Phonology guide you.
For the Life of Me... 