Putting your self into your voice

This post will be a quick one, because BayCon starts today, but I wanted to follow up on my thoughts about tone of voice that came up in the post about channels of communication.

When we speak, we communicate a lot more than just the words we say. We convey emotional messages, too. Sometimes those involve emphasis on elements of language, and sometimes they are more general-level emotional. Tone of voice can convey basic emotions like happiness and sadness, but it also conveys aspects of our sense of self - like refinement, receptiveness to approach, and gender identity. These factors can vary across cultures.

Think about the female intonation pattern that ends each sentence with a question-like rise in pitch. Not all American females use this, though I know it is very common for many Californians. When a person uses this, it makes them sound uncertain, but it also gives an impression of "cute and feminine" for some. I'm not going to go into the larger feminist issues surrounding the femininity of uncertainty here, but suffice it to say for now that adopting an intonation pattern like this can give several impressions:

1. Uncertainty
2. Cuteness
3. Femininity
4. Annoyingness

The interesting part to me is that the choice of the rising intonation pattern is not likely to be made consciously, and that it does have a definite effect of annoying people who aren't accustomed to it, i.e. who haven't learned, or accepted, the association of this pattern with femininity.

Here's a second example, in differences between English and Japanese. In English, a male speaking voice is considered to be attractive when it's low but relatively smooth. A female speaking voice is higher, but when it's pitched to be sultry and attractive, it's lower. In the context of popular singing, high male (tenor) voices often make for success, as do lower women's voices. [Though this is of course not exclusive, and both very low male and very high female voices are an important part of opera.] The contrast in Japanese is that the manly male voice is low and not necessarily smooth, and the attractive female voice differs even further, being quite high-pitched and airy. If you've ever watched Pokémon videos you might have noticed that the female character's voice is quite high and can sounds to an English-speaker's ear overly perky and babyish. A lower tone of voice in females is not considered attractive, but rather masculine, and indicates lack of refinement.

What does that mean for someone like me, a learner of Japanese who is initially an English speaker? Well, in fact it has interesting consequences. If I speak Japanese in the same tone of voice that I'm accustomed to using in English, I don't come across as "myself." I suppose I'd describe my intended manner as feminine but confident and straightforward - but the tone that accomplishes this in English is much lower than it is in Japanese. So, to portray myself as myself in Japanese, I speak Japanese in a higher pitch than I do English. English speakers often find this funny, and it is, even for me.

I think there are lots of possibilities for playing with this in subtle ways in a story. Xinta, one of the characters who appears in my novelette "The Eminence's Match," has quite a high voice. This to him is partly his natural voice (tenor) and partly a sign of refinement - but to members of the undercaste he encounters in the novel where he appears, it makes him appear very feminine. This entirely changes their assessment of what he's capable of, and leads them (for example) to underestimate him as a fighter.

It's something to think about.

Another quirk of English...

You all may have noticed - from the resounding silence - that I'm having a very exhausting week. We had a wedding last weekend, and a Sharks game. I could comment on the blog about each of those, and I'm planning to, in fact, but collectively they meant starting the week already exhausted. Then complications ensued, including a top-to-bottom autumn cleaning in honor of houseguests!

I'm hoping to get back with the program as we head into next week, but today I found a little funny pattern in English that I thought I'd share, and see if we can collectively expand upon. In general, the rule we learn is that when you take an adjective and add "ly", you end up with an adverb.

slow (Adj) + ly = slowly (Adv)
interesting (Adj) + ly = interestingly (Adv)
quick (Adj) + ly = quickly (Adv)
etc.

However, I noticed one case today where adding "ly" to an adjective doesn't actually change the part of speech.

low (Adj) + ly = lowly (Adj)

And then there are these two words, both nouns, to which you can add "ly" and get an adjective.

dastard (N, I think) + ly = dastardly (Adj)
coward (N) + ly = cowardly (Adj)

Have any of you noticed any more of these? I admit I'm guessing that Mike Flynn will jump in and illuminate all (he often does). I'm going to be looking in my etymological dictionary over the next day or so and see what I can come up with.

I think this must be one of those notorious "exceptions" for which English is so famous, and which makes it a thorny language to learn.

A Crazy Pattern in English

Yes, I am a linguistics geek.

I was driving to pick up my daughter today and thinking about the old meaning of the word "stupid," which was "stunned by grief or other strong emotion." Then it struck me that this word was probably related to the word "stupor." So I tried to think of some other examples of words with this -id/-or pattern, and within a minute or so I'd come up with valid/valor - except I wasn't sure if my extrapolation was (pardon me for this one) valid.

So after dinner tonight I pulled out my etymological dictionary (everybody should have one! :-) ) and I checked it out.

This pattern is bigger than I suspected.

The -id suffix makes adjectives out of old Latin verbs, while the -or (-our, for Brits) suffix makes nouns. Not every -id word has a corresponding -or word, nor does every -or word have an -id word, but check this out:

stupid / stupor
vapid / vapor
valid / valor
candid / candor
fervid / fervor
rigid / rigor
splendid / splendor
rancid / rancor
torpid / torpor

Valid/valor, the one I'd been wondering about, comes from the Latin vale, "to be strong or well."

I thought of another one, too: languid / languor

For interest's sake, I'll give you the ones that don't have correspondents:

-id: torrid, acid, fluid, morbid, gravid
-or: ardor, clamor, color, dolor, favor, honor, labor, odor, savor