Jonathon Owen Profile picture
Aug 19, 2019 15 tweets 3 min read Read on X
T-Rex asks, "What's the sequence of sounds that sound intelligible in the most languages?" Turns out we can answer this question with linguistics! (Though @ryanqnorth probably already knows this because he studied linguistics.)

qwantz.com/index.php?comi…
(Though it looks like T-Rex is asking about phrases, and that becomes much trickier, because then you have to consider syntax and morphology rather than just phonology. But we can at least take a stab at saying which sequences of sounds make words in the most languages.)
I think there are two main questions here: which sounds are the most common, and which syllable structures are the most common? (Because at the bare minimum, a word consists of at least one syllable.)
Some sounds are nearly universal across many languages; some are pretty rare. The /a/ sound (that is, a Latin "a"), for instance, is found in about 86 percent of languages surveyed (but not in English!), while the /æ/ sound (as in "cat") is found in only 7 percent.
I'm getting this from PHOIBLE, by the way, which apparently has data from over 3,000 languages. That's somewhere close to half the languages in the world. phoible.org
According to PHOIBLE, /i/ (as in "me"), /u/ (as in "moo"), and /a/ (close to "ma") are the most common vowels in the world (92, 88, and 86 percent of languages surveyed, respectively).
And the most common consonants are /m/, /k/, /j/ (the English "y" sound), /p/, and /w/ (96, 90, 90, 86, and 82 percent, respectively.
Syllable structure is pretty easy. Some languages allow pretty complex syllables, like English. The word "strengths" has three consonants, a diphthong (depending on dialect), and three or four more consonants at the end (depending on whether you have an epenthetic /k/ in there).
Other languages, like Hawaiian and Japanese, allow only fairly simple syllables, usually consisting of just a consonant and a vowel. But languages like English also allow simple consonant-vowel syllables, so they're pretty universal.
So it looks like sequences like /mi/, /mu/, and /ma/ would be likely to exist in something like 80 to 90 percent of the languages of the world. /ki/, /ku/, and /ka/ would be pretty close behind.
English already has /mi/ ("me") and /mu/ ("moo"), and /ma/ is pretty close to the English pronunciation of "ma" (which usually has a vowel slightly further back in the mouth).
We also have /ki/ ("key") and /ku/ ("coo" or "coup"), and /ka/ is pretty close to some non-rhotic pronunciations of "car" or some dialects' pronunciation of "caw".
Of course, even if "ma" is a nearly universal word, a phrase like "me ma moo" is much less likely to be intelligible around the world. So my guess is that there aren't really any phrases you could utter around the world that would actually be meaningful in those languages.
Certainly there'd be nothing along the lines of "Hi please don't kick anyone, that's for darn sure."

Sorry to dash your dreams, T-Rex.
It looks like I wasn't quite right about the status of /a/ in English. The short answer is that it depends on which dialect you're talking about. See this thread for more details:

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More from @ArrantPedantry

Nov 11, 2020
This is . . . not how rhymes work.

Would you like to learn how rhymes really work? Of course you would! So let's talk about syllables and stress.
Pretty much every learned how to count syllables in elementary school. A simple way of thinking about syllables is just that every "beat" in a word is a syllable. You clap along as you say a word, and that helps you figure out where the syllables are and how many there are.
So "friend" has one syllable because you say it in one beat, while "principal" has three: prin-ci-pal. (Of course, some words will vary from one variety of English to another or one person to another. Some people say "caramel" with three syllables and some with two.)
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Nov 10, 2020
The flip side of this, of course, is monochrome icons like the ones Mac OS and Windows 10 have moved to. Stripping out the color removes a lot of visual information that helps you identify the icons quickly.

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Windows 10 is even worse, I think. They've even forgone shades of gray. Everything is literally a single shade of a single color. ImageImage
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Sep 21, 2020
I keep hearing ads on Pandora for the breakfast menu at McDonalds, and I'm driving myself crazy trying to figure out the morphological rules of the Mc prefix.
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Sep 17, 2020
This is a great thread that explains, among other things, why some Latin words meaning "two" start with du- (as in "dual") and why some start with bi- (as in "biannual").
Here's another surprising Old Latin change: "lingua" (as in "tongue" or "language") is cognate with "tongue". They both come from the Proto-Indo-European *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstru…
Something like *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s may make your eyes glaze over, but the important part here is the beginning, which I'll simplify to *dng. In Germanic, a PIE /d/ typically became /t/. A syllabic /n/, I think, typically became /un/. And voilà! We have the English "tongue".
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Sep 15, 2020
I'm grading editing tests from intern applicants again, and it's reminding me how much I hate most editing tests.
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She loves to play fetch, but I have real work to do and can't turn around every few seconds to throw a toy for her. So she just sits next to my desk and whines at me.
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