Why we drop sounds. ChatGPT is changing how people talk. Kombi
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Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we're going to talk about the different ways we leave sounds out of words. And then we're going to look at a wild study showing that the way people talk is being influenced by AI. But before we start, I have two quick notes. First, David wrote in with a correction on one little bit of Latin in episode 1087 about why Latin died.

We said that in a famous scene in Life of Brian, a Roman soldier chastises Brian for conjugating Romanus to Romane. But David said that these words are nouns, so they aren't conjugated. They're declined. And he added, yes, my teacher grabbed me by the ear when I made an especially egregious mistake, just like in Life of Brian. Thanks, David.

And then the second note is that Katie from West Seattle called in and said the domain name of John Kelly's blog wasn't clear in episode 1043. So that is mashedradish.com. Mashed radish, M-A-S-H-E-D, radish like the vegetable dot com. I actually talked to John last week and it's a great blog. This next segment is by Susan Herman.

In episode 1039, we talked about how to use ellipsis, initial pronoun deletion, not the punctuation mark, in informal language to make communication flow more easily and efficiently, like the well-known advertising slogan, Got Milk?

Ellipsis is the omission of whole words, but today we're going to talk about a similar phenomenon called elision, which is the omission of sounds or syllables, usually in casual or informal speech.

We use it when we're sure the meaning will be clear and our amazing brains fill in the missing sounds. We'll mostly talk about what we do when we're talking, but elision also happens in writing, especially dialogue, or in certain kinds of literature and poetry. In writing, we normally show elision with an apostrophe.

We skip over certain sounds or syllables or even blend words together when we talk to make our speech sound more fluid and rhythmic. That's why teachers of English as a second language teach elision to help their students sound more natural.

In an article on the language learning website Lingopie on how to sound like a native speaker, an English instructor describes elision as, quote, smoothing out the bumps in speech to make it flow more naturally, unquote. After all, it would sound stuffy to pronounce every single sound in a word in a casual conversation. We've all said something like, do you suppose we could go out to eat tonight? And have been understood perfectly.

Vowels, consonants, and whole syllables can be elided. That's the verb form of elision. Almost every syllable in English contains a vowel, and we often refer to syllables as phonemes or units of sound. First, let's look at how elision happens. Vowel elision occurs only with unstressed vowels, sometimes called weak or reduced vowels, like in the pronunciations probably, chocolate, and veteran.

Each of these words technically has three syllables, probably, chocolate, and veteran, but we often shorten them to two in everyday speech. In each case, the unstressed vowel is dropped. When a syllable contains an unstressed vowel, we describe it as unstressed, too.

For the linguistically curious, stress means emphasizing a sound by making it longer, louder, or higher pitch, as in grammar, where the first syllable is stressed, or elision, when the second syllable is. Stressed vowels are never elided. That would sound strange and could cause confusion.

We can also give consonants the boot, usually when they come at the end of words or syllables or before another consonant. Some examples are next time, cold drink, and good boy, which the author of this segment admits to gushing frequently to her cats. Notice that the first two examples involve words that end in the same consonant the following ones begin with. It might sound a little stilted to pronounce both consonants like next time or cold drink.

The last example, good boy, is baby talk, which can involve omitting sounds to make words shorter or more digestible. Next time and cold drink are also examples of word boundary elision, which is when two words are blended to make communication smoother. This includes contractions like I'm or let's. Sure, we could say I am or let us, but it may sound unnecessarily formal.

The author of this segment remembers a language instructor writing G-Jet, D-J-E-E-T, D-J-E-T on the whiteboard and asking if they knew what it meant. When they sounded it out, they realized it was how did you eat yet is often rendered in informal rapid speech. There's a lot going on with that example, but you get the idea. Now we can break down elision further by where it happens or which part of the word is deleted.

First, we have apharisis, which is the deletion of sounds or syllables at the beginning of words, like lone instead of alone, tis instead of it is, and um instead of them, as in did you see um. Merriam-Webster doesn't even label em as informal since it's so common, but notes that it dates back to Middle English and was used before the 12th century. For more on dictionary labels, see episode 1079.

So elision isn't a new phenomenon and doesn't happen suddenly. Words and pronunciations change over time, just like all the other aspects of language. And we have a special name for apharisis when the vowel or syllable deleted at the beginning of the word is unstressed. Aphasis. It's very common and can be heard in words like neith for beneath and fess for confess.

The next type of elision is syncope, which is when sounds or syllables are deleted from the middle of words. Think library, camera, or probably. With syncope, the unstressed syllable comes after a stressed one.

Another interesting example is, well, the word interesting, which as University of Michigan professor Ann Curzan points out in an NPR interview, can be pronounced with either three or four syllables. And while the three-syllable and four-syllable camps may curse each other, according to Curzan, quote, if you look in modern standard dictionaries from the last 10 years, they'll show multiple pronunciations, three and four syllables, unquote.

And you can hear more from Ann Curzan in episode 980, where she was on to talk about her book, Says Who. The final type of elision is apocopy. Funny word, right? Apocopy is the omission of sounds or syllables at the end of a word. For example, most of us would say photo instead of photograph in normal conversation. Or auto parts instead of automobile parts. Or maybe obit instead of obituary. It's just more efficient.

And Renaissance fares are an interesting example. First, we often use apocopy to shorten Renaissance to ran, and yet we often spell fare, F-A-I-R-E, with the E on the end that we don't pronounce to give it an old-timey feel, like how some businesses spell old and shop with an E on the end for the same reason. These final E's were once pronounced, but then dropped, and eventually we stopped using them in modern spelling.

Finally, as I mentioned at the beginning, elision can be used in writing, especially in literary or poetic works. One notable example is the Star-Spangled Banner, whose lyrics include, "'O'er the ramparts we watched," in which over is pronounced and written without the V."

Even Shakespeare used elision in Sonnet 116, published in 1609, in the verse, It is the star to every wandering bark. These are both examples of syncope. Now go on and share your newfound knowledge of elision and member Grammar's Fun. That segment was by Susan K. Herman, a retired multidisciplined language analyst, editor, and instructor for the federal government.

I'm Katie Nolan, and I have a new podcast called Casuals. It's a podcast for people who like sports a normal amount. Casuals is a twice-a-week hang with me and my friends from across comedy, sports, and entertainment, where we talk about all the funny, weird, interesting stuff happening in and around the world of sports. So whether you're a diehard fan or just vaguely sports curious, Casuals is the podcast for you. You can find Casuals on the SiriusXM app, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to follow me on Twitter,

We'll be right back.

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One of the things I've wondered ever since I encountered AI writing was whether the patterns we see there would change how we actually use language ourselves. For example, I've wondered whether ChatGPT correctly using idioms that people often confuse, like champ at the bit versus chomp at the bit. Hypothetically, I don't know if that's actually happening. But if it did, would that cause more people to use the right phrase?

Well, we don't have the answer to that yet, but there was just a really interesting study that showed people are actually starting to talk like ChatGPT. Now, you might remember from the show last week that ChatGPT seems to use certain lofty words more often, especially when writing scientific papers. Words like delve, meticulous, intricate, captivate, and tapestry.

Well, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development looked for those top 20 words in the transcripts of almost 280,000 academic YouTube videos and found that since the release of ChatGPT, these YouTubers are also using some of these words more often.

I wondered whether the channels were just reading scientific papers out loud, since the words are already known to appear there more often. But the researchers said that they looked at videos that included both scripted content and people just talking, and they found the increases in both.

People in these types of videos used words including prowess, tapestry, reveled, and yes, delve, far more often after ChatGPT came out in 2023 than they did in earlier videos. Prowess showed the biggest increase, showing up about 60% more often, but quite a few others showed up at least 30% more often.

One interesting thing is that it isn't happening with all the words, though. For reasons they don't understand, the use of some words popular with ChatGPT, such as groundbreaking and underscore, actually fell, and it'll be interesting to see if they can find other factors that are influencing people's word choices.

One thing I wish the study would have looked at is how many of the science YouTubers using the chat GPT words had English as their second or third language.

Another thing AI writing does is flatten out dialect quirks. It's highly likely to write in standard English. So when a researcher from Brazil, whose first language is Portuguese, for example, puts a paper they wrote in English into ChatGPT and asks it to, quote, clean up the language, it'll most often strip out any phrases that don't seem like standard English.

I don't know enough about science and other languages to give you a relevant example, but I'm thinking about episode 969 from 2024 when Susan Herman wrote about calcs, like when people in South Florida say they make a party instead of throw a party because make is the verb they'd use in Spanish. So if a scientific paper had a similar kind of non-standard phrasing, I'd expect ChatGPT to change it.

And then, as we've seen, it could also put in a few delves or realms. And you can imagine that those writers in particular, who are under pressure to publish and sound professional, could absorb the idea that these words represent quote-unquote good English more than a native speaker might if they're looking at the changes ChatGPT made for feedback on their writing. And if that happens, they may also be more likely to incorporate it into their speech.

There's still a lot to tease out here, and the researchers also say that this isn't the first time computers have influenced the way people behave. They point to people changing the way they play chess or the game Go based on strategies developed by machines.

Finally, an article about the study in The Verge points out that the existence of AI can also influence how we feel about messages we receive. For example, people have been using suggested replies in email and texts for a while. A Nature paper by researchers at Cornell says billions of these smart messages are sent every day.

Ironically, people who receive these messages actually like them more than messages written by humans, and they describe the supposed people behind these messages as closer and more cooperative. But once the people getting the messages become suspicious that their conversation partner is using AI, they change their tune and rate them more negatively.

This sets up a catch-22 highlighted by the researchers. They say, quote, Perceived smart reply use is judged negatively, but actual use by the partner resulted in more positive attitudes.

So it's not AI use itself that's turning people off. That's actually making people more satisfied. It's attitudes about AI use. The feeling that the messages are insincere, inauthentic, or that someone doesn't care enough to take the time to write a message. That's turning people off. Communication is about much more than the words we use.

I've been interested in language change for a long time, and I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that these new tools that we interact with through conversational language are also a new driver of language change. It's definitely interesting, and I'd say the takeaway message is that it might not be all bad to take some writing advice from AI, but when you want people to feel like you care about them, make sure they know that you're actually writing the messages you send.

Finally, I have another answer to a question in a past podcast.

Hi Grammar Girl, this is Pete Atkinson calling. I'm on my commute. I just listened to episode 1063, I believe. And the familect was a question about a VW Bug. They're asking about the space behind the seats that they call the Cubby. I've heard it called a Combi. K-O-M-B-I.

And in fact, if you look up the lyrics of the old song by Men at Work, Down Under, the first line says something about traveling in a burned out combi. So I think that's the Australian version of that.

So it might come from there. I don't know, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Great work. Later. Thanks, Pete. What a great blast from the past it is to remember those lyrics. Traveling in a fried-up combi On an hippie trail

Wikipedia tells me that a combi is another name for the Volkswagen Transporter, which looks like a type of Volkswagen bus. And the name comes from the German combination motor vehicle, because with side windows and removable rear seats, it was both a passenger and a cargo vehicle combined. But that doesn't mean it couldn't also be the name for the cubby in a VW Bug. Thanks for the call and listening to the podcast on your commute.

If you want to share the story of your family act, a word or phrase that you only use with your friends or family, leave a message on the voicemail line at 833214GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp.

Be sure to call from a nice quiet place. And if you want that number or a link later, you can always find them in the show notes. Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast, and we have lots of other shows. This week, the nutrition diva responds to concerned listeners who worry they might not be getting all the nutritional benefit out of their favorite breakfast foods.

Thanks to Morgan Christensen in advertising, Dan Feierabend in audio, Nat Hoops in marketing, and Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts, who loves Pilates and her favorite current move is single leg bridges. And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip of day book, The Grammar Daily. That's all. Thanks for listening.

I'm Katie Nolan, and I have a new podcast called Casuals. It's a podcast for people who like sports a normal amount. Casuals is a twice a week hang with me and my friends from across comedy, sports and entertainment, where we talk about all the funny, weird, interesting stuff happening in and around the world of sports. So whether you're a diehard fan or just vaguely sports curious, Casuals is the podcast for you. You can find Casuals on the Sirius XM app, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to follow me on Twitter.

Follow the show so you never miss an episode. Give it a try. What's the worst that could happen? I've never felt like this before. It's like you just get me. I feel like my true self with you. Does that sound crazy? And it doesn't hurt that you're gorgeous. Okay, that's it. I'm taking you home with me.

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