Language Log

The following sign is posted in a New York City shop window:

Geoff Pullum gave us a really neat lesson on Finnish short vowels a few months ago, pointing out things that nobody but native speakers have ever known — that Finns produce a subtle duration of short /Ih/ vowels that the rest of us don’t even hear. But hey, The Finnish vowel duration distinction doesn’t come close to what’s going on in a remote part of Tanzania.

A really, really short /Ih/ has been discovered by phonetic scientists who study vowel duration. Phoneticians in East Africa recently have stumbled upon the shortest vowel ever known to humankind. They discovered that the duration of the /Ih/ vowel, already known for its very short length in languages like English (to say nothing about it’s tremendous importance in Finnish), is produced in .11 hundredths of a second by a small band of speakers of Kwatnaksa, who live on an otherwise unoccupied island in the Indian Ocean.

Facing a steep drop in revenue, Language Log plans to cut the pay of all employees by 10 percent and will place some writers on unpaid furloughs. There will also be additional budget adjustments, according to executive offices on the penthouse floor.

The reduced pay for non-union employees, including top executives, will become effective April 1. Several writers have been offered early retirement but at the time of this writing, management has not received responses from any of them. Anonymous sources say that the writers instead demand that the executives return all huge bonuses that they received at the end of the past fiscal year.