“Double-Dot Wide O / Nasal-Ingressive Voiceless Velar Trill”
by J–––– J––––––
From Speculative Grammarian CLI.3, July 2006
Reviewed by Jonathan van der Meer
Double-Dot Wide O
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Spoiler Alert!
It’s been more than eight years, so I’m going to go ahead and let you in on a little secret: the nasal-ingressive voiceless velar trill is a pig snort, and the double-dot wide O looks like a pig snout. (Some phoneticians will argue that they themselves produce a uvular trill. They probably do—especially when reading journals less interesting than SpecGram—but that’s a snore not a snort. And I hereby declare its symbol to be a decuple-struck z—so get it right!)
Decuple-Struck Z
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The lore around the SpecGram offices is that Trey Jones described the nasal-ingressive voiceless velar trill as such and created the double-dot wide O as a prank on his fellow grad students during his brief tenure at a certain R––– University. He still regularly brags about it to this day:
Some of the Managing Editor’s proudest moments have been discovering that previously unknown linguaphiles, from far away places, had—after reading about the nasal-ingressive voiceless velar trill on the SpecGram website—elicited strange looks from friends, family, and even strangers by performing it to “see what it sounds like”. To reach out across the internet and vibrate someone’s head like that is just magical.
And if you’ve never heard of the sound “nasal-ingressive voiceless velar trill” or the symbol “double-dot wide O” before today, then maybe it’s your lucky day. Try to reach out far across the internet, or maybe just halfway across the grad student lounge, and vibrate someone’s head. It really is magical.
