This video from Smarter Every Day features Kurt Quinn, a person who can talk backwards, in increasingly elaborate demonstrations of his skill, with a bit of phonetics thrown in. The blog linʛuischtick has an interesting further analysis of the phonetics of talking backwards. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s a short excerpt:
The point of all this is that Quinn isn’t producing speech sounds backwards. His trick is to look up the phoneme string in his mental lexicon, reverse that string, then turn the resulting string into a surface form.
For example, in a word like “fish”, which contains the sequence of phonemes /fɪʃ/, Quinn simply reverses the sequence and says [ʃɪf], which would be spelled “shif” if it were a word. The fricatives aren’t reversed in their articulation, just in their relative ordering.
One thing that really caught my attention is when Quinn talked about the “ch” sound. The sound that he’s referring to is phonetically transcribed as [tʃ], and it’s a type of sound known as an affricate. This is a sound that begins as a plosive, but instead of releasing the built-up air into a burst, it is released into a fricative sound. There is another affricate in English [dʒ], which is represented by “j” in “jam”.
Affricates are interesting because they involve the articulation of two consecutive surface sounds which correspond to a single underlying phoneme. In theory, the phoneme is a unanalyzable unit. If you ask a random English speaker to reverse the word “peach”, they will probably say [tʃip] (sounds like “cheap”). That is, they will reverse the order of the phonemes in the word, but they won’t reverse the internal ordering of the affricate. Quinn, however, has the insight that to truly speak backwards, you do need to reverse the affricate ordering. He would almost certainly say the word “peach” backwards as [ʃtip], spelled “shtip” if it were a word.
Read the rest
