You stroll into your favourite espresso store. You greet the acquainted barista, who is aware of your day by day order. You say “Hi, I’ll have the”—wait, I can’t determine write the following phrase. You know, “the usual,” however shorter. Hip! Casual! I’ll have the … uzhe. I imply, the yoozh. The youj?!
Why does this shortened type of common, which rolls off the tongue when it’s spoken, trigger a lot confusion after we attempt to write it down? When I provided my Twitter followers 32 completely different choices for spelling the phrase, no person was absolutely glad with any of them. Youge to rhyme with rouge? Yusz as if it’s Polish? Usjhe in a determined hope that some letter, someplace, would cue the suitable sound? The solely factor everybody may agree on was that each one of them felt bizarre.
Our confusion about spell uzh/yooje/ujhe reveals a number of the breaking factors between English spelling and pronunciation. Fluent audio system and writers of English usually take the connection between letters and sounds with no consideration, particularly for a standard phrase like common. When we see this connection disintegrate, it may be disorienting—a transparent syrup reworked right into a shattered toffee by the presence of 1 stray crystal. But in dissolving the hyperlinks between spelling and pronunciation, we will study an everlasting pressure between essentially the most elegant manner of writing phrases down and essentially the most elegant manner of claiming them.
In the puzzle of yuzh/uge/euge, there are two major items. The first is that the letter u has a number of pronunciations in English. The preliminary one in common entails an unwritten y sound earlier than the oo half: yoo-shoo-al. Other u’s originally of phrases may sound just like the one in untie, or the one in umlaut. Although this irregularity bedevils the schoolchild and the English-language learner, should you’re a fluent sufficient English reader to be in the midst of this text (whats up!), you’ve in all probability realized to take it with no consideration by now—not less than for acquainted phrases. But as quickly as we encounter an unfamiliar phrase, our brains run smack into the inconsistencies of English spelling once more.
The second puzzle of shortening common is much more critical than the primary: The sound represented by the letter s on this specific phrase isn’t pronounced like several of the s’s in Sesame Street. Rather, it’s influenced by the sound that comes after it. You might need seen that common has not one however two cases of the letter u—and each of them, it seems, start with an invisible y sound. That is, if we pronounce common extremely fastidiously, as if we’re presenters on Sesame Street, we are saying: yoo-syoo-al.
But more often than not, we don’t communicate that formally. Rather, we compress issues for effectivity, typically over generations, so {that a} phrase like certain (which was as soon as pronounced extra like syoor), is now solely ever pronounced as if it begins with sh. Sounds just like the y in you and the i in pizza are produced on the palate, that rounded exhausting bit towards the again on the roof of your mouth, the place your tongue curves up. And when sure consonants seem earlier than y, i, or ee sounds, they’ll get pulled towards that a part of the mouth too. Thus we get dontcha and wouldja for don’t you and would you, and gray-shuss (gracious) whereas grace nonetheless has the sooner s sound—and, to take my linguistically favourite enterprise title, a restaurant in Queens known as Jeet Jet? (quick for: “Did you eat yet?”).
Linguists name this course of palatalization, and it’s a part of a common tendency for neighboring sounds to turn into extra comparable to one another. The identical manner the actions of an artisan turn into fluid and economical with follow, producing the precise diploma of pressure essential to form a bit of clay, we will get very environment friendly at taking part in the finely tuned instrument of our vocal equipment. Rather than jerking between phonemes like a child sounding out phrases, we easily transition from one sound to the following by making them subtly extra comparable. But we’re not all the time acutely aware of those tiny changes, and we don’t all the time write them down. (I acknowledge the unlucky irony in making an attempt to elucidate how writing is an incomplete image of speech utilizing writing itself as a medium, so if you wish to hear some demos in audio type, this podcast episode might assist.)
Palatalization explains why, as an alternative of yoo-syoo-al, you may hear somebody say yoo-shoo-al in gradual or cautious speech. But the most common pronunciation of common entails a second linguistic transformation. To perceive it, we have to speak in regards to the vocal cords, the mucous membranes in your throat that vibrate whenever you say vowels and sure consonants (put your hand in your throat whereas saying zzz and really feel it buzz!), not together with the sh sound. Sometimes, when a nonvibrating sound like sh is present in between two vibrating sounds, we simply hold our vocal cords switched on the entire time for the sake of effectivity, resembling when water is pronounced wadder.
In the case of common, including vocal-cord vibrations to sh produces a sound for which English has no single agreed-upon spelling. It’s the second g in storage, and each makes use of of zh in zhuzh (as in, zhuzh that outfit up a bit); let’s name it zh for now. Zh is a sound that has a bizarre standing in English spelling. It’s both written s as a result of it’s in a phrase that’s undergone palatalization—s changing into sh or z, then turning into zh, as in common or Asia or event—or it inherits one other language’s spelling conventions when it’s in a phrase that’s been borrowed from a spot the place the sound is extra frequent, particularly French loanwords like rouge and déjà vu. (Zhuzh, with its zhuzhed-up double-zh spelling, is probably from Polari or Romani.)
Zh isn’t essentially a word-shortening deal breaker. Business informal can roughly straightforwardly get clipped all the way down to biz cazh. You might need to assume for an additional half second, however this abbreviation preserves sufficient of the letters within the unique phrase to function a cue to the not-entirely-obvious pronunciation of zh. But the clipped model of common is an ideal storm: a u with an unwritten y sound adopted by an s that’s been reworked right into a zh by an unwritten y sound in entrance of a u that’s now deleted.
How can we English writers and readers resolve these spelling points? In my Twitter bracket, I anticipated an possibility that was maximally clear about pronunciation to win, one which changed that complicated preliminary u with a extra apparent yoo, thus probably dragging a much less apparent zh or j together with it. But whereas yoozh made all of it the best way to the ultimate (beating out uzh), it misplaced in the long run to uzhe.
My Twitter ballot is on no account a scientific research, however I nonetheless assume the outcomes can provide some helpful perception. Respondents defined that they discovered spellings with u to be much less complicated as a result of that spelling saved the preliminary letter in frequent with common—so long as a silent e was there on the finish to cue the pronunciation of the u away from the sound in untie. I discover this decision elegant in its clunkiness: Solving the issue of two unwritten sounds by writing an extra, unpronounced letter is a really Englishy answer.
The advert hoc, incomplete reply to the query of spell uzhe (or yoozh, or yooj …) reminds us that English—like several pure language—wasn’t designed from the highest down by a single creator, the best way a guide is written in a unified authorial voice. Rather, language is natural and decentralized, a community the place patterns emerge from the various ways in which every of us select whom we need to speak with and speak with them. At their greatest, dictionaries and different reference supplies might be useful maps to a territory we’re all co-creating each time we choose one phrase over one other.
I began this investigation as a fan of yoozh, however I’ve discovered myself satisfied by the outcomes of my very own ballot, so I’ve determined to change to the preferred spelling. If sufficient folks determine to do likewise, possibly finally it’ll turn into the uzhe.