Betty's Tips-Fall 2023

Happy Autumn, Dear Readers,

After a mammoth hoeing session in my garden the other day, I treated myself to a lemonade and lay in my hammock in the shade of my drying corn stalks. Swinging gently, I inhaled the autumn scents of my garden. Then I thought, “English is a funny language. Scents sounds just like cents. So why does it start with an “S”? And it also sounds like sense—which doesn’t make any sense at all.

The more I write, the more I puzzle over the English language. It has such odd spellings, pronunciations, and irregular construction. For instance, many of our words contain the letter sequence –ough, but there are myriad ways to pronounce it. One author makes the assertion that English is not a phonetic language, an assertion much debated by fans of “Hooked on Phonics.”

Linguists point out that while English has only 26 letters, it has 44 Phonemes, or different sounds, even before we take into account all the various accents and dialects used by English speakers. No wonder English is supposed to be one of the hardest languages for non-native speakers to learn. (Although, depending on the native language of the learner, others might be much harder. This source lists several other European languages as more difficult to acquire.)

I decided to learn more about all this, and discovered that words that are actually pronounced the way that they are spelled are call “onomatopoeia.” They include words like growl or bang or whoosh. These words don’t come from an ancient language root or have any meanings beyond the sound they make. (Isn’t it interesting that onomatopoeia isn’t one of them?)

But as a writer, I try to use words in the best way to convey not just information, but to have an impact. There are lots of tricks for doing this.

One common way is the use of “assonance.” This means repeating a particular vowel sound in words that are close together in a sentence or paragraph, such as “the soft breeze wafts across the field.” Soft, waft, and across all have the same soft “ah” sound shown phonetically as “sahft,” “wahft,” and “uh-krahs.” This emphasizes the words and can make a phrase more memorable.

Another trick to use is “consonance.” Like assonance, it’s the repeating of a sound in nearby words, but here the sound is made by, well, a consonant. But it is the sound, not the letter that matters. “Danny Delivers” uses the same letter for that effect, but “the Chapter changed its charter” repeatedly uses “ch,” (which is a digraph rather than a consonant). “The French fought for freedom from the Pharoah,” uses “F” sounds, but not always using the letter “F” since—English!—we can make that sound in more than one way. If you repeatedly use the same letter in neighboring words, that’s called “alliteration.”

To keep its impact, though, neither assonance nor consonance should be overused.

And, of course, there is rhyme where both vowel sounds and consonance go together to give us word music and with rhythm give us some of our most popular poetry and song lyrics. (Don’t forget, Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize in literature for his lyrics!)

Word sounds can help to set a mood. Soft sounds leave a softer impression, such as blissful, misty, serene. Harder sounds impart harsher sensations, such as clobber, drag, gobble.

So, while I’ll never give up my dictionary, I know I need to do more than think of the definitions of words when I write. At least, those were my thoughts—as I serenely sipped and swung in the shade.