Part I · Chapter 2

Bone and Flesh

Two kinds of sound

Every word is made of two kinds of sound, and it's worth feeling the difference in your mouth before explaining it.

Say aaah. You can hold it for as long as your breath lasts. Your mouth is open, the air flows out freely, and your voice sounds. That's a vowel.

Now say p. You can't hold it: it's an instant. You closed your lips, the air built up behind them, and it burst out. Say t: the tip of your tongue blocked the way against your teeth and let go. Say s: you didn't block anything, but you squeezed the passage until the air hissed. Those are consonants. A consonant is something you do to the air: you cut it off, you squeeze it, you send it through your nose.

That's why consonants are like an outline and vowels like a color. The consonant draws an edge; the vowel fills the space between the edges. We'll come back to this image in Part III, because it goes deeper than it looks. For now, we stay with the edges.

Why bone lasts longer than flesh

A word is like a body: it has flesh and it has bone. Vowels are the flesh. They're soft; they change from one country to another, from one neighborhood to another, from one generation to the next, and hardly anyone notices. Consonants are the bone. They change too (nothing in a language is eternal), but they change more slowly and, above all, they change by rules.

There's plenty of evidence for this, and you already know some of it.

• Your phone. You saw it in the last chapter: thx, pls, msg. You drop vowels, never consonants.
• English accents. The word tomato is something like to-MAY-to in the United States and to-MAH-to in England. The vowels change. The t, the m, and the other t stay put.
• Semitic scripts. Arabic and Hebrew have been written for thousands of years mostly by noting down the consonants. Vowels are added as optional little marks, or not at all. Whoever knows the language fills them in. Whole cultures bet that the bone is enough.

Pulling out the skeleton: the bone comes from the sound

We'll call the set of consonants in a word, in order, its skeleton. We write it with little dots between the consonants, to show they're separate pieces:

Looks easy, and it almost always is. But there's one rule that changes everything, and you need it clear from day one:

The skeleton comes from the sound, not from the letters.

Spelling is a recent invention, full of whims and historical leftovers. The mouth is much older. When spelling and mouth disagree, the mouth wins. And English spelling disagrees with the mouth a lot. Here are the traps.

1. Silent letters don't count. Knight, write, lamb: the k, the w, the b are written but not pronounced. The skeletons are n · t, r · t, l · m. (The gh of knight is silent too.)
2. One sound, several spellings. The k sound is written c (cat), k (kit), ck (back) or q (queen). It's always k. The f sound is written f, ph (phone) or even gh (laugh). It's always f.
3. One letter, two sounds. The x of box sounds ks: that's two consonants.
4. Two letters, one sound. Th (think, that) is a single sound. So are sh (ship), ch (church), and ng (sing). Each counts once.
5. Double letters, one sound. The tt of butter and the ss of miss are single consonants. They count once.
6. The r after a vowel depends on your accent. In most of the United States, the r of car, heart, or mother is pronounced. In much of England, it isn't. More on this in a moment.
7. The y of yes. It sits right on the border between vowel and consonant, and researchers still debate where to put it. For now, mark it in parentheses: yes → (y) · s. Chapter 3 explains why we leave it aside instead of forcing a decision.

Your skeleton depends on your accent

That last point deserves a moment, because it matters more than it seems. If the skeleton comes from the sound, and the sound depends on where you speak, then the same word can have different skeletons depending on who says it.

That isn't a problem with the method. It's a fact. It tells you something real about language: it isn't a still object, it's a river with many branches. You'll come across differences like this several times in this manual, and each time they'll teach you something.

English is full of them. Look at these three words:

The k of know is written but not pronounced. A thousand years ago it was: in Old English the word was cnāwan, and the c sounded k. The spelling kept the letter like a fossil, but the mouth dropped it. And the final r of mother is pronounced across most of the United States and not in much of England. If you speak with an American accent, your skeleton of mother has three consonants; with a British accent, two.

The central bone: the root

There's one last thing to learn in this chapter, and it's the one you'll use most.

Many words are built from pieces. Act, actor, action, react: all four share a piece, act-, that carries the meaning. The rest are add-ons that say whether it's a verb or a noun, who does it, whether it happens again. We call the piece that carries the meaning the root, and the pieces stuck to it affixes: the ones in front are prefixes (re-, un-, dis-), the ones behind are suffixes (-tion, -er, -ly, -ness).

For working with codes, what matters is the skeleton of the root. If you take the skeleton of the whole word, the add-ons slip in consonants that aren't part of the central bone: the r of actor belongs to the suffix -or; the n of action belongs to -tion.

(Notice action: inside the word, the t of act- turned into a sh sound. That has a history too, but you don't need it now.)

How do you know which part is the root? Common sense is usually enough: look for other words in the same family and see which piece they share. When you're not sure, a dictionary that gives etymologies will tell you. Good free ones in English are the Online Etymology Dictionary and Wiktionary; for Spanish words, the Diccionario de la lengua española of the Real Academia Española says at the top of each entry where the word comes from.

What the skeleton isn't

The skeleton is a tool, not a discovery about the word. We pull it out ourselves so we can compare. It's like an X-ray: it shows you the bone with a clarity a regular photo doesn't have, but nobody mistakes a person for their X-ray. The word's music, its tone, its social life, what you feel when you say it, are all left out. We'll get them back in Part III.

In the next chapter we're going one step further in, literally: into your mouth. You'll find out that all those consonants, which seem so many, live in just seven regions.