Part I · Chapter 3

Seven Regions of the Mouth

A small country

This chapter is meant to be read out loud. If you're somewhere you can't make noise, save it for later.

Say these slowly, one after another: p, b, f, v. Notice where they happen. All four happen in the same place: the lips. For p and b the lips close and pop open; for f and v the lower lip touches the upper teeth and the air slips through. Different sounds, same region.

Now say t, d. The tip of your tongue touches just behind your upper teeth. The th of think and that lives here too: the tongue between the teeth.

Say k, g, and the h of house. These happen at the back, where the tongue rises against the soft palate, near the throat.

Say s, and hold it: sssss. And sh, the way you shush a room: shhhh. And the ch of church. Those are hisses: the air comes out squeezed and makes noise.

Say l, r. The tongue doesn't block the air: it lets it go around the sides, or it curls and lets it slide. The air flows.

Say mmmm with your mouth closed. You feel the hum in your lips and your nose.

And say nnnn. It also hums through your nose, but now your mouth is open and your tongue is up.

You just crossed a small country with seven regions. Every consonant you use, and almost every one in the languages you're going to learn, lives in one of them.

The seven classes

Endolinguistics calls these regions classes, and gives each one a Greek symbol. Here's the whole map:

This is the table you'll use most in the whole manual. It's repeated in Appendix A so you always have it handy.

A letter is a disguise; the family is the person

Here's the first important technical idea, and also the most freeing one.

When you compare father with padre, the first letter is different: f in one, p in the other. If you compare letters, they're different words. But both consonants live in the same region, the lips. If you compare classes, both words start the same way: with Φ.

What were four different words in the table of letters are, in the table of classes, one single sequence repeated four times. The f and the p are two disguises of the same person. That's why the kinship between father and padre is invisible to someone comparing letters and obvious to someone comparing classes.

And why Greek symbols, instead of just the letters P, T, K? Because letters belong to particular languages. Th is English; ñ is Spanish. If we wrote the lip class with a P, sooner or later someone would think the f of father is a badly pronounced p, and that's false. The classes aren't letters of any language. They deserve a name that belongs to no one.

Three fine points

Classifying is almost always immediate. But three cases confuse people at first.

1. The hiss is only the hiss. F also makes an airy noise, and so does th, and so does h. But none of them is Σ. Why? Because the class is decided by where the sound happens, not how. F happens at the lips, so it's Φ. Th happens at the teeth, so it's Θ. H happens at the back, so it's Χ. Only true hisses go in Σ: s, z, sh, ch.

2. Ch and j are read by how they end. Say ch very slowly and you'll notice it starts like a t and ends like a hiss: t-sh. The j of judge does the same thing: d-zh. They're transition sounds. The rule is to read them by where they end, so both are Σ.

3. The border case of y. In the last chapter I asked you to put the y of yes in parentheses. The reason is that this sound sits right on the line between vowel and consonant: in some mouths it's almost an ee, in others almost a consonant. Spanish ll and y (llave, yo) are the same kind of sound. When we studied it carefully, we saw that forcing it into a class threw errors into everything else. So for now it stays as a borderline case: you note it, you see it, and you don't force it into a class. That's a good lesson in method. When something doesn't fit, it's better to leave it marked than to hide the doubt.

What a class is

So far I've presented the classes as regions of the mouth, and that's the right place to start. But it isn't the whole story, and I owe you the rest.

The seven classes are called OAS, for Originating Affective Sounds. The name says something important. A class isn't a sound. It's the feeling that certain sounds produce in whoever says them and whoever hears them. That feeling is anchored in the body, in the region of the mouth where the sound is made, but it isn't the same thing as the sound.

You can notice it yourself. Say mmm with your mouth closed: there's something inward about it, closed, staying put. Say pah!: something comes out, bursts open. Say t: something stops short. Say sss: something escapes, continuous. Say lll: something runs, glides. Say k hard: something gathers at the back and pushes. Say nnn: something resonates inside.

Each class has something like a character. Endolinguistics studies it carefully. And that's exactly why I now have to give you the most important warning in all of Part I.

This warning exists because the temptation is huge. It seems natural to think: "if m feels like closing and t like a limit, then a word with m and t means 'a closing with a limit'." That reasoning is called adding up classes, and it's forbidden in this method. Not on a whim, but because it doesn't work: it produces made-up meanings that sound deep and don't survive any test. Anyone who turns the feelings of sounds into the meanings of words has stopped doing endolinguistics. They're doing something else, something close to numerology.

So what are classes for? They're for seeing: for recognizing that father and padre are the same sequence under two disguises. And they're pieces of something bigger. Meaning, when it shows up, doesn't show up in loose classes. It shows up when classes combine in a certain order and that combination repeats across many words in many languages. We call that combination a code, and it's the subject of the next chapter.

A class belongs to a family of languages

One last precision. The seven classes in this chapter are the ones I proposed for our family of languages, Indo-European. Mouths everywhere have the same lips, the same teeth, and the same back, so the physical regions are the same everywhere. But the feeling a group of sounds produces, and how sounds group together, can change from one family of languages to another. A sound that feels like force in our family may feel different in another. That's why the classes don't simply carry over to languages of other families, like Nahuatl, Arabic, or Japanese. We'll come back to this in chapter 9.