Re: Wordstuff

Tilda <spambegone@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The readiness is all.

Is that the phrase you were going to use? Do you mind if I play with
this for a minute? I'm not offering advice because I'm not qualified to
talk in depth about phonetics. Consider the following to be just a
stream-of-consciousness ramble. Maybe it'll help someday or be interesting
to someone.

If the original phrase was 'The alertness is all', I can see how it's
not wanted. 'Th-EE ah-' is a fast transition from a frontal, close-mouthed
vowel to a central open-mouthed vowel, and is unpleasant to say. Plus,
there's a hint of alliteration between 'alert' and 'all'.

You might solve the first problem while keeping 'alertness' by changing
the first word to something pronounced higher and further back in the
mouth. 'Our alertness is all.' is better, although now we really have
some alliteration going on. (Which can be good or bad.)

I can think of two ways to hammer on that phrase to make it prettier.
One is to force all the vowels into the center of the mouth. 'is' is an
edge case, being central and close-mouthed, but 'ness' is a problem.
'Our alerter's all' might make no sense, but it shows what I mean -- it's
pronounced almost entirely in the central-back of the mouth. But now
that I've made an example, it occurs to me that forcing the phonemes in
a sentence to match leads to a mechanical type of speech. Neat, I hadn't
planned that. Something to stick in my bag of tricks for future use.

The other direction I was thinking of going was accenting one syllable
in the sentence, and crafting all the others to highlight it. Turns out
that 'The readiness is all' does that pretty well -- all the vowels are
close-mouthed until you get to 'all', where the mouth opens. Compared
to the rest of the sentence, that word is shouted with a higher volume.

Let me try to highlight another word...maybe the 'is'. '-ness', the only
other fricative, has to go. I don't think I can find words for the front
of the mouth, so let me drive them to the back. 'Your honor is ours',
maybe? It's nowhere near the meaning of the original phrase -- that's not
what I was going for -- but it can be easily read with the accent on the
'is'. Although it also wants to land on the 'ours'. Hmn.

Oh, well, just some thoughts relating the pleasantness of speech to
the mouth we use to speak it. As I said, not very helpful, I just felt
like rambling. :)

.... ...
Remus Shepherd <remus@xxxxxxxxx>
Journal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/remus_shepherd/
.

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