As someone passionate about linguistics and education, I am always trying to find new ways to teach linguistics concepts in clever ways that can be understood easily. This idea for a linguistics score / word evolution exercise was inspired by a combination of the classic Broken Telephone Game and Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit that details many instructions for creating works of art, often abstract or even impossible. Unlike Yoko Ono’s work, I wanted to create something that was more tangible.
This score used to be more social justice-motivated, however I found it difficult to articulate my thoughts in alignment with the design choices so I omitted it in this version. In a future iteration of this score, I will try to focus more on the social justice message.
The score is as follows:
- Gather a bunch of people in a noisy room. Everyone should be facing the same direction, organized in a binary branching tree structure. This means that there is one person at the front center of the room, “Person 1”. Behind Person 1 are 2 people to either side of that person, Person 2 and Person 3. Person 2 and Person 3 should each have 2 people standing behind them to either side, and so on until there are no more people remaining.
- Give everyone a writing instrument and a surface to write on.
- Person 1 should secretly write down their hometown. Then, they should write it again, but backwards, in all lowercase, as one word. For example, “San Diego CA” would be “acogeidnas”.
- Person 1 should try to pronounce this word, quietly, to Person 2 and Person 3. Say the word twice, quietly but clearly.
- Person 2 and Person 3 should write down what they heard, as best they can.
- Person 2 and Person 3 should then turn around to each of their 2 people and whisper the word they wrote down to them, twice. The ones who hear the word should then write down what they heard, and repeat the process until everyone has written down something.
- Lay all the words flat on a surface and review how the words have changed from person to person.
The results of this score are quite intriguing. After running two trial runs in a classroom setting, one can see that consonants get flipped, whole syllables get erased, and complexity gets turned into simplicity. It is quite difficult for one to hear a word that they don’t recognize and try to recall it correctly, since we tend to remember phonological patterns we’re familiar with.
For example, one such trial started with the word “amnotnikpoh” for Hopkinton, MA and it became:
- Adoknicough
- Abdokmipa
- Amnotnikpol
- Adoknikal
- Mnanikal
- Amnonekal
Another trial started with the word “ailognomrenni” for Inner Mongolia and it became:
- Ilocnolerni
- Ilognomeli
- Ilognomerny
- Ilognomobi
- Ailucknomerne
- Aiglagnomali
This was an interesting exercise to see how the word for a place (although encrypted initially) slowly distorts as it passes from person to person, and volume/noise (which was simulated through the noisy room) can also contribute to the phonological changes that arise from this.
The results of this experience are artistic in nature. I compare it to the works produced in the Fluxus era, and as Jacquelynn Baas and others write in their book Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, “It should not be surprising, then, that people sometimes have a hard time experiencing Fluxus objects as art. They are not “art”; they are more like tools or games” (Baas et al., 2011, p. 8). With a mindset of artistic creation, I hope linguistics and other educators can take this approach to classroom activities because they can encourage learning in a way that is unique and inspiring.