What makes a tongue twister tongue-twisting?

Last Friday we had a little activity in intro. Linguisitc class, and later on we figure out what makes a tongue twister tongue-twisting.

Conflicting Patterns

The conflicting patterns confuse people because people tend to follow the pattern that is either invented by themselves or the grammar pattern of the language. The conflicting pattern can be simply divided into two:syllable structure and sound sequence.

1. Syllable Structure

The reason syllable structure can be confusing in the tongue twister is that people tend to figure out some pattern to follow. And tongue twisters use syllable structure. For example,

She sell seashell on the seashore.

Despite the preposition (on) and the article (the), "seashell" and "seashore" are both two syllable structure. As mentioned earlier, people tend to figure out some pattern to follow, no matter the pattern is making sense or not. Therefore, as people read the tongue twister faster and faster, it might sounds something like "Sheshell seashell on the seashore."

2. Sound Sequence

Usually the spoken language avoid conflicts in sound sequence because it is hard to pronounce the slightly different sounds again and again correctly. For example, 

	Which	witch	wished	which	wicked	wish	?
initial	wh	w	w	wh	w	w
vowel	i	i	i	i	i	i
final	ch	ch	shed	ch	ked	sh

• The initial consonant of each word are either pronounced "wh" or "h"
• All the vowels of each word is pronounced "i".
• The final consonant of each word are pronounced "ch", "sh" or "ked" (here view "shed" and "sh" as the same)

The sound sequence of initial consonant is "ABBABB" while the final consonant is "AABACB". The conflicting patterns of the initial consonant and the final consonant confuses people and brings up the tongue-twisting effect when speaking the tongue twister.

Stress/ Tone Pattern

Usually stress/tone pattern is not obvious in English but pretty clear in Mandarin Chinese, because of the special feature of four different tone. For example,

門前一口井，
好像一面鏡，
鏡裡幾顆星，
星光亮晶晶。
石落水井中，
打碎水中星，
擊破水中鏡，
井中鏡破星碎。

Here "井"(Jĭng), "鏡"(Jìng), "晶"(Jīng) all pronounced "Jing" but with different tone, which is very confusing because it break the rule of "a simply pattern to follow."

Phrase/Clause Structure

Similar phrase/clause structure can be confusing, too. For example,

I saw Esau kissing Kate. I saw Esau,
he saw me, and she saw I saw Esau.

This tongue twister is mainly with the pattern of "who saw who", but change the subject and the object constantly, which, again, break the rule of "a simply pattern to follow."

--

Judy Chou, Eng dept. @ FJU

please noted the original author when quoting.