Judge This!

(screen shot from NBC's Community)

I'm not normally a spelling fanatic, mainly because I'm such a horrible speller myself. However, I'm also not a set designer for a major network sitcom production. Unlike the person who designed the backdrop for the recent episode of NBC's Community which featured a gigantic sign reading "JUDGES BOOTH." I'm reasonably certain that the booth in question is possessed by the judges in question, rendering the preferred orthography as "JUDGES' BOOTH" (same in MLA and APA, see Purdue's excellent OWL site for MLA and for APA):

add ' to the end of plural nouns that end in -s:
--- houses' roofs
--- three friends' letters

See for yourself: Community, Season 1 : Ep. 5 "Advanced Criminal Law", 9:26 minute mark (on Hulu)

The Perils of Orthography or Words Without Vowels

I just signed up for the new online linguistics magazine Cambridge Extra as advertised on The Linguist List. The magazine is apparently going to run little Q&A competitions every issue – “In each issue you will have the chance to win different prizes from Cambridge University Press.” The inaugural question is this

What is the longest word in the English Language without a vowel in its spelling?

Now, the key here is “in its spelling”. When I first read the question, I missed that part and thought real hard about this. Hmmmm, I thought, is there a word in English that has no vowel when pronounced? It’s true that there are expressions that we utter that are voweless, like “Hmmmm” above, or answering a question like my mom with “MmmHmm”. But it’s real easy to get tricked by orthography when analyzing a “word” like nth as in ‘the nth iteration”. While spelled with no vowel, it is pronounced with an initial vowel, something like /ε/, an open, mid, front vowel. I Googled the question and discovered quite a range of attempts at answering the question, almost all of them consistently mistook orthography for phonology.

This is like frikkin crack to a linguistics blogger! I found this juicy, but representative answer posted on Yahoo! Answers posted by “Mrs. C”:

Is there any word without a Vowel?
Best Answer - Chosen by Voters
sky, rhythm

PS: To the people screaming 'Y is a vowel' ... er, no it's not! A E I O U are the only 5 vowels. Y SOUNDS like a vowel in certain words, but it doesn't 'become' a vowel just because it sounds like one! Even my 8 year old students can tell you this!

Although this answer is consistent with the intent of the spelling constraint, I love this part: “Y SOUNDS like a vowel in certain words, but it doesn't 'become' a vowel just because it sounds like one!” Heehee. With an exclamation point for emphasis too!!! Has there ever been a more convoluted blurring of the difference between letters and phonemes?

To put it simply, Yes! If something sounds like a vowel, it does indeed become one! Regardless of what orthographic representation it may take. Although phonology and writing systems were never my interests in linguistics, I am quite certain that orthographies are never more than convenient hacks engineered to approximate the phonology and phonotactics of a language. They are always imperfect.