Tongue twisters, long words and complicated dictions

PalmaA tongue twister is a sentence that is difficult to pronounce. Usually, tongue twisters are used as games, especially to entertain children with little more than words. We have all tried to say, as quickly as possible, tongue twisters like ‘Setze jutges d’un jutjat mengen fetge d’un penjat, si el penjat fos despenjat es menjaria els setze fetges dels setze jutges del jutjat’ (Sixteen judges of a court eat the liver of a hanged man, if the hanged man were unhanged he would eat the sixteen livers of the sixteen judges of the court), and ‘Un plat pla blanc ple de pebre negre està’ (A flat white plate full of black pepper is). If we look at the characteristics of these sentences, we will find a shared element: the repetition of a sound. The repetition of a sound is a stylistic device that we call alliteration and which also occurs in poetry, as in that verse by Josep Maria de Sagarra, “Vinyes verdes vora el mar” (Green vineyards by the sea). But unlike alliteration, a tongue twister consists of the repetition, usually at high speed, of alternating sound sequences. With this system, the difficulty arises when a different but similar sound appears. If we think about ‘Un plat pla blanc ple de pebre negre està’, the mistake we usually fall into is reaching ‘pebre negre’ and pronouncing ‘peble negle’ or, if we want to prevent it, pronouncing ‘pre’ and not ‘ple’. In these cases, the ‘l’ and the ‘r’ are consonants that are pronounced by placing the tongue at the same point in the mouth, before the upper teeth. In a tongue twister like ‘De genollons collia codonys, de genollons codonys collia’ (Kneeling he picked quinces, kneeling he picked quinces) the change in the order of the word ‘codonys’ and the similarity of the first syllable with the word ‘collia’ can cause us to say “de genollons codonys codia’” or, due to the similarity of the last syllable of ‘genollons’ and ‘codonys’, to say “de genollons collons collia”. The second one will surely be the one that will make the person who challenged us to pronounce the tongue twister laugh.

‘Lapsus linguae’

A similar phenomenon that might seem like a tongue twister, but without the intention of being one, is what we know as 'lapsus linguae': the inopportune confusion of one word with another or the pronunciation of a word influenced by the previous or following word. The most common lapsus linguae are malapropisms, which happen when we swap an infrequent word for a more frequent one. It is an automatism of our brain when it decides to resort to a word it 'knows better' instead of the one we mean to say. Surely you have heard of the 'posteta' to refer to the prostate and the 'basílica' to refer to the gallbladder. The philologist Joan Miralles collects an 18th-century malapropism, with which a scribe from a town in Mallorca recorded that a series of expenses had been incurred to repair a 'fornicatory' machine, all while referring to a fumigation machine. A type of (well-)intended malapropisms are those of euphemisms: the voluntary substitution of an offensive term for a neutral one. Thus, my grandfather always used to say he was 'shitting on Cròstol', who is nobody, or 'on the fleas'. There are also people who ask us not to 'touch their flats' and they are not talking about musical matters...

Leaving aside the lapses, let's return to the purely articulatory challenges. Because tongue twisters are not the only way the language has of putting us to the test: we can find complications in a single word. Long words work with a different logic than that of the tongue twister. Here the problem is not the alternation of similar sounds, but the quantity of syllables that we must keep 'loaded' in our head while we are still pronouncing them. Try saying 'meteorology' and 'deoxyribonucleic acid' in one go. It is not solely your problem if you said 'meteorology’ and ‘deoxyribonucleic’. These are tricks our brain plays on us to mitigate the effort these words require. In the first case, avoiding the contact of two vowels in ‘meteorology’, in the second, making the vowel equal to the first in ‘deoxyribonucleic’. The more syllables a word has, the more likely these things are to happen to us. Some words also contain complicated pronunciations, that is, flows of sounds that make them difficult to articulate. This fact usually occurs with foreign names, such as that of the actor-politician Schwarzenegger, which we have heard pronounced in a thousand different ways. A funny anecdote is that of the ‘Astre’ street in Manacor. This street was named in 1969 as ‘Armstrong street’ in honor of the astronaut who first set foot on the Moon. Over time, among the people of the city, the American's name was distorted and became ‘Astro’. With the standardization of street names into Catalan, the Manacor City Council set it as Carrer de l’Astre, thinking that that ‘Astro’ referred to a celestial body. At least everything remained within the semantic field of space.

Making mistakes is fun

At the end of the day, between tongue twisters that make us lose our temper, long words that we never finish saying, diction that stops us due to mechanical limits, or a street in Manacor that ended up changing its name because no one knew how to pronounce an astronaut's surname, the conclusion points to the same place: this lady, very lady-like who always goes by car but is always wet, does what she can. The tongue is a muscle and has physical limits, it can get tired and can be less agile on certain occasions. Furthermore, our brain always chooses the shortest path, the one that is most comfortable and easy to take. It deforms, simplifies, substitutes one syllable for another, and can play tricks on us, putting 'balls' where 'quinces' should be. Perhaps that is why tongue twisters have survived entire generations of children without the need for instructions: they don't teach you to speak better, they teach that making mistakes is fun and, above all, it is not a failure, it is a challenge to get the tongue moving.