# Pivoting Vowels in the Dark Some people do the crossword before bed. Some people do Sudoku. For about thirty years, I have done something else. I lie in bed with a notepad, sound out a word in my mind, and start pivoting it. I take the vowel and swing it: long O, short O, over to A, up to I. I soften a consonant, then harden it. I swap letters that carry the same sound, an *s* for a *c*, a *v* for a *w*, because the ear hears through spelling. I strip the word down, sound by sound, until I am almost at the grunt underneath it, the *muh* and the *ma* that sit behind *mom*, *me*, *my*, *mine*, *mother*. Then I listen for which other words light up. I have hundreds of pages of these doodles. Most of them would look like nonsense to anyone else, columns of syllables with arrows and circles, but they are a record of connections I found in the dark, kinships between words and meanings that time had buried. I never thought of it as scholarship. It was play, the way some minds relax by working a puzzle. It is also how I learned most of what I know about how words carry meaning, and how much meaning words carry that we no longer notice. ## The day the book found me My nightstand filled up with word books over the years. Donald J. Borror's *Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms*, with its great green tree on the cover. Donald M. Ayers's *English Words from Latin and Greek Elements*. Mark Forsyth's *The Etymologicon* and *The Elements of Eloquence*. Pocket notebooks piled up beside them, crammed with pivots, arrows, and columns of syllables, wedged between pages of technical notes from my working life. Then, after about twenty-five years of this, I found a book that stopped me cold. It was a history of the Proto-Indo-European language, and I paid seventy dollars for it on the spot. As I read it, I just about had a heart attack. What I had been doing alone in bed for a quarter century was a field of study. Linguists had spent two centuries doing it with rigor. They called it comparative historical linguistics, and they had reconstructed the ancestor of English, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and hundreds of other languages: [[wiki/Proto-Indo-European|Proto-Indo-European]], a language with no surviving writing, rebuilt entirely by tracing how sounds shift between its descendants. The irony was almost funny. A single textbook, something like James Clackson's *Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction*, laid out the very roads I had been feeling my way along in the dark. Had I found a book like that at the start, I could have saved myself twenty-five years of sounding out strange noises as a hobby. The scholars had already drawn the map. Then again, I am not sure I would trade those years. Reading the map is one thing, and walking every road by ear is another. All that time pivoting vowels in the dark trained me to hear the connections, so when the book finally named them, they landed as recognition, the shock of meeting something I already knew. That book became one of my favorites. I lost it, along with my entire library, when a cyber attack tore my world apart and I had to leave everything behind. I have been searching for it for years, and I still cannot remember its title. If I find it again, it will get a place of honor in the new section of the website. And there were my grunts. Linguists reconstruct a nursery root *mā-*, "mother," behind Latin *māter* and our *mother*, and a separate root *me-* behind *me*, *my*, and *mine*. Roman Jakobson, one of the great linguists of the last century, wrote a whole essay in 1960 called "Why 'Mama' and 'Papa'?" about why those sounds turn up in language after language. The bottom of the well I had been sounding out had a name. ## What I had been doing, in the field's own words It turns out my late-night method has several proper names. **Vowel pivots.** Linguists call this [[wiki/Ablaut|ablaut]], or vowel gradation. A root holds its consonants steady while its vowel swings to change the meaning: *sing, sang, sung, song*; *ride, rode*; *drive, drove, drift*. It goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. Greek *legein*, "to speak," pivots to *logos*, "word," and the same root gives *lexis* and *lexicon*. Its cousin, [[wiki/Umlaut|umlaut]], is why we say *foot* and *feet*, *mouse* and *mice*. **Sounds that travel.** Sounds shift across a whole language in patterns so regular that linguists call them laws. [[wiki/Grimm's Law|Grimm's Law]] explains why Latin *pater* is our *father* and Latin *centum* is our *hundred*. English also went through the [[wiki/Great Vowel Shift|Great Vowel Shift]], when our long vowels climbed and turned, which is why *bite* once sounded like "beet." Once I understood that [[wiki/Sound Change|sound change]] runs along predictable lines, my pivots stopped being guesses. They were following the same roads the words had actually traveled. **Sounds that mean.** Some sounds seem to carry meaning in themselves. Linguists call this [[wiki/Phonosemantics|phonosemantics]], or sound symbolism. Words of light cluster around *gl-*: *glow, gleam, glint, glitter*. Words of the nose cluster around *sn-*: *sniff, snout, sneeze, snore*. In the [[wiki/Bouba-Kiki Effect|bouba-kiki]] experiment, people around the world match the made-up word "kiki" to a spiky shape and "bouba" to a round one. ## A page from the notebooks Here is a page much as I scribbled it, about *vi* and *s*: > *Vi* — vision, seeing more, ad-vise (enlightening). > *Vi* — vying, reaching up like a vi-ne. > *Sssss* as in incision, decision: cuts and makes smaller. > A vise and a vice are both *vi-ssss*. Clamp down, see less, be less. Less enlightenment. I found *vi* and *s* so rich that I once gave a full hour-long broadcast to nothing else. Here is what the documented record says about that page. *Vision*, *visible*, and *advise* all come from the Latin *videre*, "to see," so the *vi* of seeing is real. The tool called a *vise* comes from Old French *vis*, "screw," which comes from the Latin *vitis*, "vine," named for the spiral of a vine's tendril. So the vine and the vise, which I had connected by ear, really are kin. The moral *vice* comes from a different Latin word, *vitium*, "fault," and *vie* from Old French *envier*, "to challenge." Those connections belong to the resonant layer, and the picture they paint, of a vine reaching up toward the light and a vise clamping it down, still holds. That page is the whole method in miniature. *Vi* rises: it sees, it reaches, it climbs like a vine toward the light, toward enlightenment. Add the hiss of the *s* and the rising turns into a vise, a clamp that cuts the climber off from the light. Swap the *s* for a *c* and the same sound becomes *vice*: a moral deficit that clamps a person in place, so they can no longer climb like a vine toward enlightenment. When I hear *envy*, I hear the same story at once: the *vi* pressed down, the reaching that has been cut off from rising and can only look up at someone else's height. The documented record agrees in its own way. *Envy* comes from the Latin *invidia*, from *in-* and *videre*, "to look upon," so envy is literally a way of seeing: the gaze of someone who has been lowered, watching another rise. ## The S that cuts One of my notebook pages has a column that reads *stop, -sision, decide, incision*. I had written that the S sound felt like a cut, a closing, a choosing of one path by severing the others. That one turned out to be literally true. *Decide*, *incision*, *concise*, *precise*, *excise*, and even *scissors* all descend from the Latin *caedere*, "to cut." To de-cide is to cut away every option but one. I had heard the blade in the word years before I could prove it was there. ## Building it in software The notepad was only half of it. From 1994 into the mid-2000s, I tried to build my ear into a machine. What began as a rhyming dictionary grew into a symbolic language engine that stored pronunciation apart from spelling, indexed words by sound, and rhymed long words against whole phrases, because the ear has no idea where the spaces are. All those nights pivoting vowels became the design. I tell that story in [[projects/Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine|Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine]]. ## Two layers, both worth keeping There is a long tradition for that second kind of hearing too. Esoteric writers called it the [[wiki/Green Language|Green Language]], or the language of the birds, reading words by their sound to uncover hidden meanings, and the alchemical writer Fulcanelli made it famous in 1926. Plato took up the same question more than two thousand years ago in the [[wiki/Cratylus|Cratylus]], asking whether names fit their meanings by nature or by agreement. Even [[wiki/Ferdinand de Saussure|Ferdinand de Saussure]], the founder of modern linguistics and the man who taught that the sign is arbitrary, spent years privately hunting for names hidden in the sounds of Latin poetry. So I keep both layers, and I label them. The documented layer shows where a word has actually been. The resonant layer shows what the word does to the ear and the mind today. Set side by side, they teach more than either one alone, and the honesty of the labels makes the discoveries more persuasive, never less. ## Why it matters to me This is what I mean when I talk about the power that comes from studying words. I do not mean a bigger vocabulary or a sharper debating style. I mean the [[wiki/Morphology|connective tissue]] that becomes visible when you see words in their parts: the roots, prefixes, suffixes, phonemes, and vowel pivots that link one meaning to another. It is intelligence that moves through the [[wiki/Negative Space|negative spaces]] between words, where the connections live. It is also how I find the lost things. A culture forgets why it says what it says. The words remember. My broadcasts are full of these decodings, such as *disappointment* as being un-appointed from your own high station, and *adventure* as what comes to you and becomes part of you. They all come out of those notebooks. I am going to start organizing those pages into a new section of the website, so you can watch the pivots happen and try them yourself. All you need is a notepad, a quiet room, and a word you have said a thousand times without ever really hearing it. ## Related topics - [[wiki/Phonetic Etymology|Phonetic Etymology]] - [[wiki/Proto-Indo-European|Proto-Indo-European]] - [[wiki/Ablaut|Ablaut]] - [[wiki/Umlaut|Umlaut]] - [[wiki/Sound Change|Sound Change]] - [[wiki/Grimm's Law|Grimm's Law]] - [[wiki/Great Vowel Shift|Great Vowel Shift]] - [[wiki/Phonosemantics|Phonosemantics]] - [[wiki/Bouba-Kiki Effect|Bouba-Kiki Effect]] - [[wiki/Green Language|Green Language]] - [[wiki/Cratylus|Cratylus]] - [[wiki/Ferdinand de Saussure|Ferdinand de Saussure]] - [[wiki/Roman Jakobson|Roman Jakobson]] - [[wiki/Etymology|Etymology]] - [[wiki/Morphology|Morphology]] - [[wiki/Lexicon|Lexicon]] ## Related blogs - [[blog/20261016 - The Human Language Model|The Human Language Model]] - [[blog/20261016 - The Irksome Zero Matter in Semiotics|The Irksome Zero Matter in Semiotics]] ## Related articles - [[projects/Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine|Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine]] - [[livestreams/Releasing Anxiety by Reexamining the Stories We Carry - Livestream|Releasing Anxiety by Reexamining the Stories We Carry]] - [[livestreams/Reclaiming Selfishness, Balance, and the Whole Self, Part 1 - Livestream|Reclaiming Selfishness, Balance, and the Whole Self, Part 1]]