Tongue Twisters
Created | Updated Mar 23, 2002
On modern Earth, tongue twisters are a barbaric (but nevertheless amusing) form of entertainment designed around the simple fact that language is hard.
Let's face it: natural languages, especially those found on Earth, are rarely well-designed. (Those that are, like Esperanto, suck eggs so badly only a small core group of zealots ever want to use them.) No matter how tightly the language-lawyers try to keep control over the language specifications (see France), the end-users keep subverting things, inventing new words, and generally perverting the language even more than it was before they started. They'll even mix in words from other languages. (See French and Quebecois; "Tres grande party last weekend, eh?")
At least it leaves room for some simple fun. Many languages, such as English, have a mixture of sounds, some that are easy to pronounce, some that aren't so easy -- and some that are easy only when not combined with others. ("I'm sorry" is a good example of this last category.) Other languages are just flat-out jawbreakers and have no easy sounds at all -- Welsh comes to mind. Did you ever hear of vowels, Wales?
And so the fun of tongue twisters is inventing strings and combinations of sounds that are hard to say in series. For added effect and bonus points, the good ones are designed in such a way as to trip the tongue into saying bits of absurdity or even outright rudeness instead of the intended phrase.
Tongue twisters can be played in many ways. Originally, they were a method of torture and interrogation, but the intervening years since their introduction have scaled down their intensity immensely. Unlike their brothers, puns, they are not banned by the Geneva Convention. The most common useage is to repeat the tongue twister multiple times (anywhere from 3 to 10 is common) as quickly as possible, usually all in one breath.
The hardest tonge twister in English is, remarkably enough, a simple name: Peggy Babcock.
Let's face it: natural languages, especially those found on Earth, are rarely well-designed. (Those that are, like Esperanto, suck eggs so badly only a small core group of zealots ever want to use them.) No matter how tightly the language-lawyers try to keep control over the language specifications (see France), the end-users keep subverting things, inventing new words, and generally perverting the language even more than it was before they started. They'll even mix in words from other languages. (See French and Quebecois; "Tres grande party last weekend, eh?")
At least it leaves room for some simple fun. Many languages, such as English, have a mixture of sounds, some that are easy to pronounce, some that aren't so easy -- and some that are easy only when not combined with others. ("I'm sorry" is a good example of this last category.) Other languages are just flat-out jawbreakers and have no easy sounds at all -- Welsh comes to mind. Did you ever hear of vowels, Wales?
And so the fun of tongue twisters is inventing strings and combinations of sounds that are hard to say in series. For added effect and bonus points, the good ones are designed in such a way as to trip the tongue into saying bits of absurdity or even outright rudeness instead of the intended phrase.
Tongue twisters can be played in many ways. Originally, they were a method of torture and interrogation, but the intervening years since their introduction have scaled down their intensity immensely. Unlike their brothers, puns, they are not banned by the Geneva Convention. The most common useage is to repeat the tongue twister multiple times (anywhere from 3 to 10 is common) as quickly as possible, usually all in one breath.
The hardest tonge twister in English is, remarkably enough, a simple name: Peggy Babcock.
