Sounds Good

Speech is a stream of sound, just like music. And like music, we somehow know when it sounds right and when it doesn’t. Instantly. Automatically.

It seems almost inconceivable because language is so damn complicated when you tease it apart to find out how it works. There are the things that we think of as “words”, strung together into sentences, or at least utterances. The order of the words makes a big difference that reflects whether you’re stating a fact, asking a question or telling someone to do something. It makes a surprising difference when you use several adjectives in a row to describe something. The exact form of the words change—sometimes a little, sometimes a lot—depending on exactly what you’re talking about or why. Extra little words or word parts get sprinkled in, too, for effect or to ensure clarity.

And language isn’t just a pile of words and an enormously complicated set of rules: it’s also melody, rhythm, tempo, timbre and sometimes a percussion section—the nuance and emotion that gets layered into and on top of whatever is being said: tenderness, sarcasm, urgency, humor. All of it is carefully spun together into a single, thin stream of sound. And we know when it’s not quite right, because it sounds that way.  

Language wasn’t created by grammarians or linguists: it was created by people who recognized what sounded good. The sheet music came later.