Tekerleme | Tongue Twisting [O]

Reconnecting with Turkish: The Impact of Script Dependence on Language Perception

click on the picture to watch it on youtube

SONGLINE: Ceddin Deden Nessie Babamdır

YER: Bozkurt Wombatin Bahçesi, Wombatistan

aus terör, language recovery, scripts, sound perception, text-based frameworks

0141 cokchokechalk | 0:43 | 27 Feb 2022

While my mouth may engage different articulatory regions to produce distinct sounds, my auditory perception often processes them as similar--| if not identical. This is a prevalent phenomenon in the Türk`ic language landscape, where such overlaps occur frequently. In contrast, it is more sporadic in English--| however, a similar experience will arise with foreign or tertiary words I've never encountered before. When faced with obscure or rarely used terms--| especially those that may be foreign borrowings--| it becomes challenging to deconstruct or decipher tangible meaning from the sounds. This will complicate efforts to determine the correct spelling, especially when there's no straightforward convention to represent sounds which are completely unfamiliar.

I am acutely aware that the alphabet has been functioning as a form of dogma in my thinking. When I listen to words, my mind instinctively tries to process and spell them out through text. This reliance on the alphabet overshadows the nuances of the sounds I hear, which are often fluctuating. The alphabet limits my understanding of the richness and variability of spoken language.

I struggle with the Türk`ic [o] vowel, because it will often fluctuate towards [a] or [u]. Additionally, the English [o] sounds (as in «how now brown cow») does not exist in Türk`ish. This led me to create an exercise to explore what would happen when I focused on cycling through the closest approximations I could find. I wanted to experiment with words that uniformly started and ended with the same consonants. I needed a consistent scenario, to focus on examining the variations in vowel pronunciation more closely.

«çok» was the Türk`ish word I was trying to match, «chaulk» was the closest approximation I could find. An Uzbek [o] I’m familiar with aligns with how I say «chock» in English. This vowel doesn't really exist in Türk`ish either. «choke» was another sample of [o] that doesn't consciously exist in Türk`ish.

It was very difficult to record these words in sequence because I found myself tongue-tied throughout the process. I recognised this as an ideal tongue twister formation, which motivated me to use only three consistent audio samples. I wanted to see what would happen if I stacked them into a repetitive loop. I wanted objective accuracy, aiming to zoom in on how the central vowel would shift and to determine whether this fluctuation could have been influenced by my awareness of English. Since my perception is also shaped by the sounds that either precede or follow, I wanted to explore how changing the order of the sequences would affect the outcome as well. This is what caused my perception of the consonants to shift, into other variants like [j] & [t].

Awareness of my father's English accent (which is how his Türk`ish was imprinted into me through English), this was causing me to perceive the word «joke» through «chaulk». Consciousness of the Australian vowel through «choke», was responsible for me perceiving «toke». I'm also aware, as I was using audio samples - had it been more organic, I know I would have been perceiving other shape shifting consonants like [ç|ch, ş|sh, ts, z]. The endings of my [k] are also carrying essence of [t] at the end. Even when they're not always clearly articulated, but they're still present - I persistently feel "off" - if I can't here the high-hat click of a [t] at the end of certain types of [k] sounds. Sometimes, it's as though [k] was functioning as [t].

My [ki] is often misheard as [çi|chi], and this isn’t just a matter of human perception; even computer systems and AI make the same alleged error. When I produce [ki] or [çi|chi], I use completely different parts of my mouth to create the sounds, yet perceptively, they can still sound identical. I now recognize that this phenomenon frequently occurred during the transcription of Türk`ic languages into Latin (and other scripts). Reconnecting with Türk`ish has illuminated how my reliance on scripts, has contributed to a form of being Deaf, Blind, and Mute with language, due to how I was formed to think so heavily, through a text-based lens.

NB - this was another re-link attempt that happened after another significant derailment. It was also the beginning of the MAAT series starting to individuate as a parallel groove alongside the creative expression axis.

~ My Name Is Ayça, get used to it

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