Althouse: "It was around this time that I started separating the alphabet into good letters, V as well as M, and bad letters, S, F and T, plus the terrible vowel sounds..."

June 7, 2019

"It was around this time that I started separating the alphabet into good letters, V as well as M, and bad letters, S, F and T, plus the terrible vowel sounds..."

"... open and mysterious and nearly impossible to wrangle. Each letter had a degree of difficulty that changed depending upon its position in the sentence. Much later when I read that Nabokov as a child assigned colors to letters, it made sense to me that the hard G looked like 'vulcanized rubber' and the R, 'a sooty rag being ripped.' My beloved V, in the Nabokovian system, was a jewel-like 'rose quartz.'"

From "My Stutter Made Me a Better Writer/At times it caused suffering, but it also gave me a passion for words and language" by Darcey Steinke (NYT).

16 comments:

gilbar said...: I'm really surprised that Nabokov spent the time and trouble assigning colors to Roman letters?
What did he assign to Cyrillic??; 6/7/19, 6:06 AM
Jaq said...: Did it teach him not to use overused and under laden words like “passion”?; 6/7/19, 6:18 AM
rehajm said...: How do you know it made you a better writer? You don't. Imagine how great you could have been without the impediment.; 6/7/19, 6:18 AM
Darrell said...: Bullshit.

Making a word salad for virtue signalling and profit.; 6/7/19, 6:19 AM
Jaq said...: Darrell says it better.; 6/7/19, 6:34 AM
Darrell said...: If not that, then the article is an admissions letter to an insane asylum.; 6/7/19, 6:50 AM
traditionalguy said...: Blonde words have more fun.; 6/7/19, 6:58 AM
Roger Sweeny said...: from Joseph Henrich's The Secret of Our Success:

"Spoken languages vary in their sonority. The sonority of our voices decreases as the airflow used for speech is obstructed and is highest for open vowels, like the /a/ and lowest for so-called voiceless stops like the /t/ in tin. Pronounce each of these sounds and note the difference in the constriction of your airflow. Both vowels and consonants vary in sonority, but vowels generally have much higher sonority than consonants. This means that more sonorous languages tend to have more vowels (e.g., Hawaiian), while less sonorous ones pack the consonants together (e.g., Russian). For the same energy and effort, more sonorous speech sounds can be heard at greater distances and over more ambient noise than less sonorous ones.

"It turns out that if all you know is climatic temperature, then you can account for about one-third of the variation in the sonority of languages. Languages in warmer climates tend to use more vowels than those in colder climates and rely more heavily on the most sonorous vowel, /a/. For consonants, languages in warmer climates rely more heavily on the most sonorant consonants, like /n/, /l/, and /r/. By contrast, languages in colder climates lean more heavily on the least sonorous vowels, as the /i/ in deep."

Comments "Scott Alexander": "I’m a little worried about p-hacking here, but still, whoa! The thing where Inuit languages sound like tikkakkooktttippik but Polynesian languages sound like waoiuhieeawahiaii has a cause! The phonetic nature of words is shaped by the experience of the people who produce them!"; 6/7/19, 7:48 AM
Fernandinande said...: I'm really surprised that Nabokov spent the time and trouble assigning colors to Roman letters?

That's uptalk.

Nabokov writes:

"The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated) has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped)."; 6/7/19, 8:29 AM
mikee said...: Having been taught to read using phonics, I mispronounced a word I'd never heard pronounced, "indict" with a hard c, in a 9th grade class and was laughed at by the rest of the class and the teacher. The memory still burns decades later. The silent c, then my nemesis, has kept me watchful for tricksy letters ever since. Colors and merit aside, some letters are just mean.; 6/7/19, 9:48 AM
Yancey Ward said...: She must have hated being asked her name growing up.; 6/7/19, 10:58 AM
Narr said...: Synesthesia, meet the Althousers. VN didn't assign those colors, they were part of his perception of the world; some people say that certain musical tones have colors to them, and vicey-versy.

Narr
I take them at their word; 6/7/19, 11:54 AM
rcocean said...: Good Letters - V, W, M, N, R

Bad letters - X, Z, Q, J, C

Never liked C. Its just a wimpy "K". J sounds too may like "A". X, Z, Q are simply useless. Losers.; 6/7/19, 3:43 PM
Jaq said...: Has Steinke written anything as good as Nabakov? If not, then poser.; 6/7/19, 5:42 PM
Narr said...: In Love and Death, the widow and the mistress of the deceased split his letters.
One took consonants, the other vowels.

Narr
Which way to the Village Idiots get-together?; 6/7/19, 7:12 PM
rehajm said...: On Countdown I cheer when Rachel pulls a Zed.; 6/7/19, 8:43 PM