“Say what?”
Tick Tock. Tock Tick.
Mmmm, that doesn’t sound quite right.
Nor does flam flim, or dong ding, hop hip, or song sing. Why? might you ask. You know instinctively that those are …”just wrong”. But you ponder – Why? What ancient linguistic police decided these expressions were incorrect?
The truth is that these pronunciations are instinctive to the English language. And why, you may ask?The answer to the 24,000 dollar question is – the placement of the vowel sounds in our mouths.
There are high vowels, mid vowels and low vowels. Countless acting students have learned to “speak with distinction” from the Edith Skinner method of speech. And in mocking tones, the students joke that they “mutht thpeak with dithtinkshun.” But this is no laughing matter. To aid in clear speech, as well as dialect speech for performing, the actor would do well to discover the placement in the mouth for proper pronunciation of English words as well as correct dialects of any kind. Short i, e, a, and ah, aw are the sounds made by placing the lips and teeth highest, lower and so on in the mouth. It is natural to form the highest placed vowel first and move onto the lower placement as in “tick tock” rather than “tock tick”. It’s just easier to do. This is called ablaut reduplication by linguists. The standard explanation of how we determine the vowel progression is described as short I, followed by short A and if a third vowel sound, short O. In other words, the vowel sounds of the repeated word or phrase are I,A or I,A,O. This phenomenon also occurs in other languages because, hey, we all have the same mouths. However it should be noted that this vowel pattern goes all the way back to the origin of many languages, Proto-Indo-European and Indo-European, which I mentioned in a previous post. Proto-Indo-European and Indo-European began in the area of the steppes of Eastern Europe some 4,000 yeras ago. Sanskrit, Hindi, Farsi, German, French, Latin are some of the languages that stem from that Mother Tongue.
There’s also a natural rhythm expressed with the stresses in the common words and phrases we use. There was an old convenience store with the name White Hen Pantry, the sound of which drove me nuts and I never knew why that was so. I always said it should be better to say White Pantry Hen. Why? Because of the stressed and unstressed pronunciation. If a stress on a syllable is marked as / and the unstressed as __ , the first store name is / / / __ , and the second name, __ __ __ /. This is why iambic pentameter, ( __ /, or unstressed, stressed) is the most common stress pattern in poetry, particularly in Shakespeare’s verse. “Light through her window breaks” doesn’t have the same appeal as “What light through yonder window breaks”. The latter is iambic pentamenter – unstressed/stressed. Why do our ears prefer that pattern? Well, it has been suggested that our heartbeat is iambic pentameter (da dum da dum) and therfore unstressed/stressed is attuned to our own bodily rhythm.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160908-the-language-rules-we-know-but-dont-know-we-know
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