“English is boobytrapped,” Walter muttered, his thought racing through a constellation of references. Among decades of clips of amalgamated faces saying “boobytrap”, Data from The Goonies was the clearest. Faces from countless movies, TV shows, video games, even YouTube. They’re always laughing, shouting, or saying “boobytrap” of course. When they shout it’s all in vowels, like the teacher in Peanuts having a bad day.

Tha why sem! Sem sem boobytraps!

“No. It’s not a constellation, it’s a solar system. The astrophysical model is a metaphor for memory. Data is the vividest memory associated with boobytrap so in this particular solar system Data is the Sun. He has the largest mass therefore the greatest gravitational pull. The other memories are planets and miscellaneous celestial bodies, all of which are too faint to recognize because they’re obscured by the Sun. But they’re on the tip of my tongue, dammit!” He had stopped sweeping.

“And they’re not references. I haven’t decided what to call them. Associative Echoes? No, they all end up sounding like rejected Pink Floyd album titles.”

English is boobytrapped. Perhaps a lexicographer’s idea of an inside-joke, but for a schizophrenic prone to etymological flights of fancy it is catastrophe lying in wait.

Apophony is a linguistic concept. Sounds within words can change to indicate grammatical information, usually with vowels. Words like sang, sing, song, sung; or bind, bound; tooth, teeth. That’s apophony. The term was probably coined by Jacob Grimm in his seminal study of the German language, Deutsch Grammatik, published in 1819 and arguably the catalyst for what became Linguistics. Writing in his native German, Grimm used the spelling ‘Apophonie’ citing Ancient Greek as the source of his neologism. Somewhere between German of 1819 and English of 2018 the word for “meaningful sound-changes in words” underwent a meaningful sound-change of its own. Is that apophony?

Apophany is a psychiatric concept. In contrast to an epiphany, the German ‘Apophänie’ was coined in 1958 by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad as the tendency to perceive meaningful connections where there are none. More words of varying degrees of interrelation, each distinguished by meaningful sound-changes.

“Correct, these also contain sound-changes, although they’re subtle. It’s probably a different concept. If not, it should be. How did you find out about apophany?”

I was reading about apophony on WikiPedia. At the top of the article right under the title it says ‘Not to be confused with Apophenia.’ That last word links to its eponymous article, so I clicked on it.

“And what is your interest in apophony?”

Someone should make a disambiguation page. You know when you’re looking something up on WikiPedia, say phoenix, and instead of taking you to the article on Phoenix, Arizona it takes you to this huge list of mythological birds or businesses, books, albums, military vehicles… all with the name Phoenix?

“Sounds familiar.”

And, if you search 'disambiguation’ it takes you to a Disambiguation page – for disambiguation! At the very bottom of the page it says:

The word that refers to identifying which meaning of a word is used needs help identifying which meaning of itself is used? What is that page, the Singularity? You should go there. E-N dot wikipedia dot org slash wiki slash disambiguation (capital D) underscore open parenthese disambiguation (little d) close parenthese.

“I’ll do that.” No you won’t. “You haven’t answered my question.”

I was researching vowels. They’re very telling. English has turned them all on their head, especially in North America. And there you go! It’s geography.

“What is geography?”

The vowels – one thing they reveal very reliably is where the speaker comes from. In the States there are many regional accents, each with their own subcategories of local accents and dialects. For example, take the word Hi. I speak American English with a non-regional accent so I pronounce it with two vowels in rapid succession: a - the open front unrounded vowel and ɪ - the near-close near-front unrounded vowel. Together they sound how way we say 'eye’. But I grew up in Texas where many have a Texan accent which, as any Texan will tell you, is distinct among accents of the American south. A typical Texan accent will say Hi with æ - the near-open front unrounded vowel. That’s the A-sound in the word 'cat’.

“Why were you researching vowels?”

Because they’re all arbitrary! Ay, ee, eye, oh, you? For every vowel – even 'Y’ – there’s at least one English word spelled with one vowel but pronounced with another.

“Such as?” Like –

Just because I can’t think of an example off the top of my head doesn’t invalidate my point! “Settle down.”

“Just take your time and gather your thoughts. Think it through and you’ll find it.”

’Women’? That’s two I-sounds. There are no I’s in women. (The letter).

“Speaking of women, if we always pronounced the 'O’ the way we do in the word ’one’ we’d spell women O-M-E-N.”

And the ə? The most common vowel in the English language is the sound “uh” and it’s not even in the alphabet. It’s an upside-down lower-case 'e’ which can be misread as a lower-case 'a’ – especially if it’s handwritten – which is ironic because it’s also how we pronounce the indefinite article 'a’.

“Most of the time. Why does it matter if vowels are arbitrary?”

They’re only arbitrary in how we perceive them. For the coiners all vowels serve the same function, so in that sense they’re arbitrary. They use the vowel’s periodicity as a tuning reference, optimizing their vocal chords and alveoli for sympathetic resonance.

“That’s the group you’ve been talking about? The Coiners? The ones who can read a person’s mind by hearing what, their vowels?”

Of course not. Ideally they use the gestalt of speech and speaker. But they’ll have a good head start with nothing more than an 'Um’. There are vowels but there’s also consonants, prosody, inflection, pitch, register, amplitude. Each has a part to play but the vowels are the crux of it. But, if the coiner hears their name? That’s more information than they’ll ever need. A name spoken by it’s owner is the densest signature you’re gonna get out of them.

“Focus on the vowels. You were researching vowels and at some point in your research you arrived at the Wiki page for apophony. How did you arrive there?”

I was suspicious of them. The vowels. It was years ago when I first noticed how random their usage in English is. Doesn’t everyone at some point? I can recall a general sense of confusion about all this from vague memories dating back to elementary school! But more recently I was doing deep-dive etymologies on Wiktionary – that’s WikiPedia’s dictionary. Wiktionary is unique in that any definable combination of letters has a dedicated page. But unlike WikiPedia where they route any confusion through a disambiguation page, all available lexicographical and etymological data about that combo of letters are presented on that same page for all languages in which that combination occurs. That’s unprecedented and it’s fucking digital to boot. And, for each entry in English a table of translations is provided in as many languages as possible – and if the original English word has multiple definitions, each definition is given its own table of translations. This would’ve required searching through stacks and stacks of books and cross-referencing so many terms that a team of linguists would need hours to collect a fraction of what I can review in mere seconds, all for a single word. Armed with a freakish curiosity one can drill down quite far. I’m convinced that without this resource I never would’ve discovered them.

“Discovered who?”

Not who, what. The Prime Consonants. Sorry, I really should have started with these. They’re the main takeaway from all of this.

“Not the vowels?”

Yes and no. There are eight Prime Consonants all of which require the Ürvokal for articulation. The Ürvokal is breath, symbolized by the letter 'H’. Speech requires breath and 'H’ is articulated by literally exhaling. So, when reducing words down to their Primes you discard all the vowels. At that level they truly are arbitrary. Low-level programming uses only consonants, like an organic version of Assembly.

“What are the eight Consonants?”

The eight Prime Consonants are B,K,L,M,N,R,S and T. But those aren’t exactly letters I’m naming… While they do refer to the letters themselves, they symbolize the prime-states of glyph, phoneme, mechanical articulation, and ordinality with regards to acquisition.

“There must be fifty different scenes from movies with the nerdy expert explaining the imminent catastrophe to the beefcake hero and the latter snaps at the former 'In ENGLISH please?!?’”

Walter froze as his voice’s echo decayed down the corridor. Overcome by a wave of embarrassment, he clutched at his broom awaiting any sign he’d been heard while nervously rewinding the conversation back in his head, worrying he’d been speaking out loud for some time… The click of the clock’s minute-hand snapped him out of it as he slowly inhaled, teething his bottom lip. “Watch it!” He was whispering now.

“What do you mean 'in English?’ You know this stuff just as well as I do!”

But you know how irresistible the urge is to share – what did you call them? Associative echoes? Plus, considering the topic I didn’t want to upset you. “By shouting it out loud?!” I was quoting!

Another echo but with a much quicker decay. Walter was whispering but still managed to get quite loud. A firm whisk of his broom provided an effective mask, but he was alone.

“It’s called a stage whisper. And it decayed quicker because it’s all high-frequency noise which is high-velocity, high-energy. It’s short-lived! Stop editing yourself, you self-conscious prick. It’s boring, get over it and stick to the script. You were saying something about symbolizing prime-states at which point you lost me.”

Prime-states - in general, you think of each prime as their respective letter and sound and that’s also how we’ll think of them here most of the time, while doing our reductions. But then there’s the physical mechanics of actually rendering the phoneme. These dictate when a person acquires the ability to correctly speak each sound during their childhood development. All of these factors influenced the selection of the eight Primes. So when I refer to the prime 'B’ or 'N’, for example, I mean the glyph and it’s variations; the sound (prime consonants only have one phoneme); the mechanics of producing the sound (especially in the context of other sounds); and the timeline of when each phoneme is acquired by the speaker. From all this we reduced the alphabet down to these eight letters. Every single word in every single language of Western Civilization can be reduced down to a combination of these eight letters.

“I still don’t get what all this has to do with apophony.”

Apophony is the mutability of vowels inside of a word, which proves that the essence of the word lies in its consonants. There are twenty-one consonants in the English alphabet. Thirteen of those are derivative of the eight Pr– Hang on. Five vowels, eight prime consonants, thirteen derived consonants, twenty-one total consonants?

“Those are Fibonacci numbers!” Walter was bending back four fingers against the broomstick, demonstrating his unusually extreme double-jointedness which had been a reliable party trick in undergrad.

“But what about 'H’?” What about it? “I thought it was a separate, more fundamental letter/sound. Wouldn’t that corrupt the sequence of Fibonacci numbers?” Not necessarily. It’s a single letter, right? It could be the one at the beginning of the sequence. “What about the other one?” It’s both! “The inhale/exhale! YESSS – like the tchetchragrammatchron,” Walter growled softly through clenched teeth. It was partly the surge of excitement but also to throw off eavesdroppers, knowing perfectly well that no one was within earshot.

There is something hidden in human language. Human communication, really.

“That’s your goal? To find it?”

That’s impossible. An individual is incapable of finding it alone, it’s too much data. You know why they invented chaos theory? Weather. Meteorology as we know it exists because of chaos theory. At the dawn of the Cold War governments suddenly had grave concerns about weather prediction. After all, they needed to be absolutely certain their missiles wouldn’t fly off course due to some freak storm and, God forbid, detonate in friendly territory. Their mathematicians realized that to make predictions within an acceptable margin of error required plotting the behaviors of virtually every particle in the atmosphere. This is an immeasurable, uncountable quantity, an obvious nonstarter. Ed Lorenz stumbled upon the answer, but his stroke of genius was to think of the stump in the first place: he built a simplified mathematical model of the atmosphere. He figured there’s only one way to count the uncountable: you approximate. Without those initial conditions, who knows if we’d have even made it this far.

“So you hope to what, crowdsource the computational power?”

That’s an interesting way to put it. But it’s more than just processing power. You’d have to crowdsource the data, which may be a catch-22.

“How so?”

Because it would have to be open source. But unlike the Wiki sites with entire communities moderating content to conform to strict rules of style and verifiability, this has to be different because it’s a value-neutral system. As far as its concerned, trolling of WikiPedia articles is just as valid as the articles that say the sky is blue and water is wet. These are all expressions of human culture through the medium of language. That’s like the OED handing the reins over to Urban Dictionary. Can you imagine?

“I can.”

It’s hard to know how to even classify the data before we start collecting it. The only solution I can surmise is to train a deep-learning neural network in parallel with the data-mining efforts. The first generations of neurons would inform the best way to proceed, in theory.

“AI? I think the internet has made you overestimate your capacity to acquire new skills.” It definitely has. That’s what landed me in here – bit off more than I can chew. What’s that Robert Frost quote? Itch Robert Browning. “I guess both apply. More boobytraps?” There’s only one – on WikiPedia.

“The Disambiguation Singularity Page?”

No, that’s just a sad joke. It’s the apophony/-phany paradox. Like I said, there’s something hidden in the language and apophony is a symptom. It is a key to finding what lies beneath all communication. But according to experts, it’s my theory about meaningful sound-changes in words that’s the real symptom, a symptom of schizophrenia called apophenia. And my discovery about apophony was an apophany, an instance of apophenia. So my theory about apophony is wrong and its wrongness can be expressed by a word that just happens to resemble subjecting the word 'apophony’ to itself.

“In this case two wrongs kind of make you right. Right?”

Maybe.