Our catch phrase is on its way.
Dear Fellow Earthlings,
It is very difficult analyzing the individual phonomes of the nine native speaker informants I worked with while I was in the Falkland Islands. I know that their primary synergy (S1) comes from the region of the abdomen, as mine does. S1 differs, according to the language you are taliking about. For example, S1 for Japanese is in the mouth, for Arabic in the the back of the throat, for Hindi in the chest. As for Seneca (See installment 25, 26, 28, 32, 33, 37), I still do not know, but I feel its S1 is possibly in the front of the mouth and, simultaneously, in the nasal passage. Getting back to my 9 informants, their secondary synergy (S2) and tertiary synergy (S3) are similar to my own, since these nine people and I all are descended from native speakers of England-based English with whom we were in constant contact from our infancies. As a result of that exposure, we picked up England-based English S2 and S3. As for quaternary synergy(S4), the chief difference between the community phonome of the 9 Falkland Islands informants and my own is that quite a few of them are not averse to the substitution of F and V for voiceless th and voiced th, respectively. Furthermore, some of them do it in free variation. For example, three of them will pronounce “moths” as MoFs in one effort, but as Moths in a subsequent one. Their quaternary synergy constitutes the biggest challenge as I attempt to set up jingles that are appropriate for helping the Jingles learner develop a Falkland Islands English allophonome. This is, of course, no surprise to me. You see, in Jingles theory, it is quaternary synergy that is responsible for dialectal variation (and here, I am speaking of phonological phenomena only, not vocabulary or syntax or usage) among native speakers of a given language, be it English, Spanish, Shona – or any other human language. S4 variation is extremely subtle. So it is going to take a lot of work for me to characterize it.
Steve Walker, Earthsaver and Jingles Creator
© 2013 Steve Walker, The Jingles-The Japan Foundation for English Pronunciation, Summit Enterprises.