Morpho-phonologically AI
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Will Shortz, "Sunday Puzzle: Artificially Confused", NPR Weekend Edition 8/9/2025:
The theme of today's puzzle is A.I. every answer is a familiar two-word phrase or name in which the first word has a long -A vowel sound and the second word has a long-I vowel sound.
1. Numbers after six, seven
2. Shortest distance between two points
3. Fear of speaking before a large audience
4. Direct interaction with someone one on one
5. One of two things on the rear of a car
6. Two-wheeler you can pedal off-road
7. Injury that might come with venom
8. Have a short break
9. What cuts a porterhouse or T-bone
10. Increase in salary
11. Manicurist's implement
12. Astronaut's trip
13. Like cornstalks that reach halfway up the body
14. Fearsome shark
These seem easier than the weekly puzzlers usually are:
- eight nine
- straight line
- stage fright
- face time
- tail light
- trail bike
- snake bite
- take five
- steak knife
- wage hike
- nail file
- space flight
- waist high
- great white
So it occurred to me to wonder whether there's something especially easy about common phrases made up of two monosyllabic words whose vowels are /eɪ/ and /aɪ/. Here's (just) a start towards an answer to that question.
The cmudict pronouncing dictionary has 15,453 monosyllables, and 1187 of they have the EY vowel (in ARPAbet), while 925 have the AY vowel. That generates a set of 15453^2 = 238,795,209 monosyllable pairs, of which 1187*925 = 1,097,975 have the A.I. vowel sequence, which is plenty of phrases even if it's less than half a percent of the total set.
Picking pairs at random sometimes yields nonsense, like NAME NUYS or RAVE EIN, and sometimes things that make sense even if they're not idioms or fixed phrases, like JAILED PRIDE or TRAINED THAIS. The proportion of pairs suitable for Shortz's puzzle is of course very small, though there are certainly plenty more candidates than the ones he used.
What I still don't know is how the set of A.I.-voweled phrases compares with the phrases that are vocalically matched with other two-letter initialisms, like I.E. or B.O. or U.S. or M.D. I have a harder time coming up with examples in the other cases, but maybe I'm just primed by Shortz' list.
Update — Ironically, since this puzzle was vocalically inspired by the term "AI" , I'm guessing that current AI systems are not very good at solving (or creating) puzzles like this. I'll give it a try later today.
Rick Rubenstein said,
August 11, 2025 @ 5:00 pm
I couldn't resist the challenge for I.E. I came up with quite a few relatively quickly, though unlike Will's list, mine has several repeats within columns.
Extra-bright headlights
Non-productive retching
"Was I singled out by Fate?"
Chilled caffeinated beverage
Different, redundantly-named caffeinated beverage
U.K. late-afternoon meal
International waters
Kind of girder
Main ghost-costume material
Typical Phoenix weather
Illegal activity binge
Primary thoroughfare (UK)
Small amount of wind
It means you're out
Colorado mountain
Chicken breast, e.g.
Andy F said,
August 11, 2025 @ 10:01 pm
Number 10 actually offers a second good solution: Pay Rise!
Andy F said,
August 11, 2025 @ 10:23 pm
Thanks for sharing this, it's a fun style of puzzle. My son and I tried then, then traded a few of our own before bed. He definitely came up with the best of ours: "When mom says it's way past your bedtime."
Miles B said,
August 12, 2025 @ 4:54 am
@Andy F – "pay rise" sounds more plausible. I assume "wage hike" was Mark's own solution as I don't see that the official answers have been published.
Mark Liberman said,
August 12, 2025 @ 5:15 am
Numbers from COCA:
pay hike 51
pay rise 25
wage hike 50
wage rise 6
I believe that "pay hike" was the official answer, as per Will Shortz in the broadcast:
SHORTZ: Right. An increase in salary.
HOFFMAN: A pay raise. Or pay hike.
SHORTZ: Pay hike is it.
Jerry Packard said,
August 12, 2025 @ 6:20 am
Charles Hockett in phonetics class used to pass out long poems he had written in which he controlled the phonetic features like palatal, apical, aspirated, vowel height, etc. in the lines and stanzas of the poems. It made for interesting reading.
Robert Coren said,
August 12, 2025 @ 8:55 am
I believe "rise" in reference to a salary increase is an almost exclusively British usage; USAns pretty much always say "raise".
Haamu said,
August 12, 2025 @ 11:06 am
We should probably prefer "pay" since wages and salary are, as I understand it, technically two different things.
Yuval said,
August 12, 2025 @ 11:43 am
Sorry Andy F, I'm stumped. Little help?
Gabriel Holbrow said,
August 12, 2025 @ 1:09 pm
In the original puzzle, I found it harder to guess the ones where the solution had an /L/ after the vowel in either word. And those answers felt less satisfying. I think I just discovered that pronunciation in my natural dialect (or ideolect) changes the production of these vowel phonemes before the /L/ phoneme. I wonder how widespread that is among other North American speakers.
Brett said,
August 12, 2025 @ 1:40 pm
@Yuval: "late night"
Mark Liberman said,
August 12, 2025 @ 1:48 pm
@Gabriel Holbrow: "In the original puzzle, I found it harder to guess the ones where the solution had an /L/ after the vowel in either word. And those answers felt less satisfying. I think I just discovered that pronunciation in my natural dialect (or ideolect) changes the production of these vowel phonemes before the /L/ phoneme."
Vowel+/l/ allophony is not only possible but common, though I don't recall seeing documentation of /eɪ/+/l/ effects. So to answer your question, we need two answers from you:
1. Where are you from?
2. Record yourself saying "tail", "trail", "nail" — or the phrases those came from — and give us a link (or send as an attachment)…
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 12, 2025 @ 2:36 pm
There are two possible outcomes of FACE + /l/: (1) There is "pre-L breaking", i.e. the offglide of the diphthong is high front but an audible schwa is "inserted" (I know, I know, what a naive segmental analysis) before the /l/; or (2) The offglide is considerably centralized, resulting in very little diphthongal movement.
The former is (I think) more prevalent in the US; the latter — in Southern England and Australia (where the relative openness of the starting point of the diphthong adds to the confusion).
Examples can be easily found in a dictionary: the Oxford Learner's has the two side by side for tale, for example.
Pre-L breaking is discussed all over the place, e.g. it has an entry in John Wells's dictionary, and is explicitly given in transcriptions. The centralization of front vowels before dark /l/ is also discussed in many sources, e.g. Cruttenden's Gimson's pronunciation of English or Collins & Mees's Practical English phonetics and phonology.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 12, 2025 @ 2:41 pm
Oh, and in those Southern English accents where there is l-vocalization, when the centralization of the second element of FACE combines with it, you end up with something that could plausibly be transcribed as [æːʊ] or the like. Check out Geoff Marshall's pronunciation of Wales on in the first seconds of this YouTube video.
Jerry Packard said,
August 13, 2025 @ 5:58 am
So I went to the audiologist yesterday for a hearing test. Being an experimental psycholinguist, it didn’t take me long to suss out they were looking at initial and final nasals and stops. The initials were easy, and for the finals I just concentrated on the pre-final vowel length, which is the actual determining factor, and aced it (well, 96%-100% L-R), even though my high frequencies have lost acuity big time.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
August 13, 2025 @ 9:48 am
Haamu,
Good observation. In American law, "wages" are the money that shows up in your paycheck (supercategory). If you get a "salary" (subcategory), you get a fixed amount every pay period, whereas if you are not salaried, you are paid hourly, per diem, etc.
Michèle Sharik Pituley said,
August 13, 2025 @ 10:18 am
@Brett @Yuval I was thinking “play time”!