A friend of mine so loathes the effort involved in explaining complex facts about his life, that it has become a running gag between us that every time I ask him something that threatens to call forth such a response ("what's happening at work?", for instance), he responds with the catch-all phrase: "oh... you know... the usual."
Except he doesn't say "the usual." He says only the first two letters of that word, "the us," but pronounced as they are in the word "usual." It's a simple enough sound to make. It is one that occurs in plenty of American English words. "Casual," for instance. Or the second g in garage. There is no difficulty whatsoever in saying it conversationally.
The problem only arose when I tried to reference this inside joke in print. Pulling up my gmail, I started to write a message. "Oh, you know," I typed. "The..." And then I drew a blank. The "us"? That just sounds like the objectival form of a collective pronoun. The "Uj?" That looks like it should be spoken with the closing consonant sound in "judge." The Uzhe? The Yuzjhe? The Yoodghze?
It is the same problem that arises in the attempted transcription of a term one hears frequently on RuPaul's Drag Race. There, the contestants are routinely encouraged to do a particular thing... a verb that is easy to say, but seemingly impossible to type phonetically. The word consists of the letter "u," bracketed on either side by this same consonant sound. Something like "zhuzh," or "juj."
We can indicate what sound we are trying to convey by saying that it's the "French j" sound. But that still doesn't help us transcribe it phonetically for American English readers; not unless we append that cumbersome explanation. For a long time, therefore, I was stuck.
At last, help arrived in the form of scientific linguistics. Ferdinand de Saussure, in the influential text based on his lecture notes, the Course in General Linguistics, not only introduces a symbol to denote the sound, but manages to demystify the whole subject by placing it in the company of the other fricatives (a class of phonemes).
A fricative is simply any speech-sound made by the friction of air passing through a closed mouth (as opposed to an open aperture). Beyond this, the class can be subdivided based on how the mouth is closed.
Saussure notes that air passed through two closed lips—the hypothetical labial fricative—does not exist as a unit of speech in any language (at least not any then known). I suppose it would sound like a scoff (voiceless), or the noise we make with our lips when we are trying to imitate a motor (voiced). Perhaps it was judged too rude a sound to have any role in the forming of words.
(So too, the fricative formed by placing the tongue between the lips—the "raspberry"—has been similarly proscribed in articulate speech and does not appear in any larger word.)
Fricatives that have been incorporated as phonemes into words, by contrast, include the labio-dentals and the dentals. The former are made by compressing the lower lip and the upper set of teeth: these are the "f" and "v" sounds, with the only difference between the two being that the latter is "voiced" (as in the vocal chords vibrate in its pronunciation), whereas the latter is unvoiced.
Likewise, the dental fricatives also come in pairs, with each set of two sounds being formed with the same articulation, and the only difference between them being whether or not they are voiced. The "th" in "the," and the one in "thought," for instance, are actually different sounds. Both are formed by placing the tongue between the two sets of teeth, but the former is voiced, whereas the latter is not.
If we keep our jaws shut and our lips open, meanwhile, but move the tongue to the roof of the mouth, just behind the upper row of teeth, we can produce another pair of sounds. The "s" sound is made in this fashion if we simply pass air through our closed teeth, and it becomes a "z" sound in turn if we vibrate our vocal cords.
A "z" sound, that is to say, is nothing but a voiced "s." Try it and see.
We are closing in now on the quarry of our hunt. Suppose we keep our lips open and our jaws shut, and move our tongue further back still. Now, pass air through this enclosure without vibrating the vocal cords. What sound results? In English orthography, we write it as "sh." But it is preferable for purposes of linguistic transcription to have only a single unit for it, so Saussure writes it "š."
Now, as we have seen, every time we have a voiceless fricative, we are likely to find its voiced equivalent as well. So what happens when we form the voiceless "sh" sound, then start vibrating our vocal cords? A sound results that appears in many American English words, but which we cannot transcribe directly in English orthography. A sound that, by now, should be very familiar to us.
Indeed, we have found it at last. The voiced post-alveolar fricative. The "French j." The "zhe" sound in "the uzhe." Now, we have a symbol for it. Saussure denotes it simply as a z with a caron: ž (on analogy to how z is the voiced equivalent of the voiceless s, ž is the voiced equivalent of the voiceless š).
So we are at last in a position to transcribe RuPaul's Drag Race accurately, as when contestants are told that their outfits are passable, but that they really need to "žuž it up a bit more."
And I am finally in a position to write that inside joke in print. I can say, in my next email to my friend, when anticipating his response to an overly-involved question that he does not really want to answer: "Oh, you know... the už."
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