By Gil Cohen
Ever heard of the saying: “Once you see it, you can’t unsee it”? Let’s say you have a friend who has a habit of chewing very loudly, but you don’t hear it. Then, one day, another friend talks about your other friend’s loud chewing, and afterwards, you can’t stop hearing it! It didn’t bother you before, but now it really bothers you (just like in that How I Met Your Mother episode).
Could it be the same for languages and language change? Once you hear about a change that’s happening in your language, you keep noticing it all the time, consciously? If you do, how does it affect you and your day to day life? Would it make you overthink the way you speak? Would it make you embrace the change, or on the contrary, distance you from it?
A few months ago, a good friend of mine and I chatted on WhatsApp, and he wrote ships, when he actually meant chips, which is how we say “French fries” in Hebrew (probably a remnant of the British mandate), but also a slang term for something that is extremely easy. I didn’t pay much attention the first few times he used it, like I wrote in an earlier piece about noticing language change (Issue #27).
Then, a few days and WhatsApp chats later, he wrote lejit (pronounced /leʒit/), when he actually meant legit, which is a slang term, used in a similar fashion to the one in English. That caught my attention, since it’s not just the one time or the one word that he “misspelled”. So I asked him whether he actually pronounces these words as ships and lejit, and he wrote back that he thinks he does.
Now let’s take a small detour to the world of Digital Discourse, which is the discourse held between humans through a computer, or CMC (Computer Mediated Communication). One of the most interesting things about CMC is the way we speak (or write). It’s not quite the spoken language, but it isn’t any closer to the formal, written language. One wouldn’t compose a message on WhatsApp (or any other messaging app) like they would a formal letter, right? The ones that do are usually made fun of (take Captain Holt from Brooklyn 99 as a great example for this).
Nevertheless, our CMC language is closer to the way we actually speak, and it reflects it, be it in the use of nonformal structures, slang terms or pronunciation (or spelling). We (or maybe that’s just me and the ones I chat with) write the words in our messages usually like we say them.
Back to my friend: If he wrote these words on WhatsApp the way he did, that probably does mean that he pronounces them that way. So after I asked him about the way he pronounces these words, I asked him if there are more words that he pronounces differently. I trying to find a pattern and was already thinking about the changes that have happened when Latin gradually evolved to French and in French itself (/g/ -> /d͡ʒ/ -> /ʒ/ and /c/ -> /t͡ʃ/ -> /ʃ/).
One of the things all these words have in common is that the vowel following the consonant in question is a front vowel (i or a), which is the phonetic environment in which the Latin-French change has happened. I wanted to challenge him with words with back vowels, but couldn’t think of any.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t live close by and we rarely see each other, so I couldn’t test my theory in person, and in fact forgot about it. Then, all of a sudden, a few days ago he sent me message in which he wrote: “Gil, pay attention, shopsticks (instead of chopsticks)”, and I asked him whether he really pronounces that word in that fashion, and he said he would from now on, and that he thought about me when a mutual friend used chopsticks. That’s when I realized that I have ruined it. He is now aware of the fact that it is a different pronunciation, and he may be doing it on purpose, just because of me.
I know that we, as language enthusiasts, are more aware of linguistic changes than the common person, who are to the most part ignorant (and I don’t mean it in any degrading way). Does being aware actually affect the way we speak? I believe it does, at least for me. Like I wrote in my last piece (Issue #28), I noticed a few changes in Hebrew, and it made me self-conscious about the way I speak. Nonetheless, the changes that I am trying to avoid sometimes slip by and find their way out of my mouth.
But I’m hyper aware to things related to language, what about my friend and the other laypeople? Had this tiny beam of light that I have shone on this change made him “see it” and now he can’t “unsee it”? Or would he continue his day to day life, once in a while thinking about this change and writing to me about it? I think that even if he won’t be hyper aware of this change, like I am, he would be at least slightly more aware of it, and perhaps to other changes in the language.