Suboptimist

There is No ‘T’ in Mountain.

Let me refer you to a conversation I once had with a girl (yes, I talk about this crap with girls):

Me: The moun’ins are nice.
Girl: It isn’t ‘moun’in,’ it’s mountain.
Me: It doesn’t matter.
Girl: There is a ‘t’ there. Pronounce it.
Me: No, there isn’t a ‘t’ there.

Nary a week passes when I don’t catch part of a discussion of Utah English (which is really ‘Rocky Mountain English’). The word mountain is often the topic of such discussions. The common pronunciation in the Rockies is either moun’in or mou’in. There are of course segments of the population who would never, ever dream of doing such a thing to the English language. Here is why there isn’t a ‘t’ there: the common idea of letters making up words didn’t exist until literacy became widespread. While human language (a system of sounds to convey meaning) has existed for 40,000 plus years, the earliest writing we know of doesn’t appear until 6600 BC in Jiahu, China.

You see, you can be fluent in your native language and even others while remaining illiterate in those languages. An illiterate speaker isn’t aware that the word mountain contains a ‘t,’ but he has an unconscious understanding that there are only a handful of sounds that can come in the place of what we now symbolize as ‘t.’ Someone may counter, ‘Well, they are clearly not intelligent of competent enough to know.” Okay, and to this I say, “If we take another illiterate speaker from a dialect that says mountain, are they any more or less intelligent or competent than the other? There is no ‘t’ in mountain. I am interested in text linguistics, for what it’s worth.

On another note, Apple is supposed to be a computer company. Instead of releasing the new Intel-based PowerMacs, they release another faulty mouse. If Apple insists on producing mice, then it should know that it has had more than 20 years to manufacture a decent mouse, but has failed.