Introduction to Tempelinguistics

It will have escaped few people’s notice that the Spanish, Portuguese and, to some extent, the French, are slack-jawed peoples.

CHANCED upon the eminent and endlessly knowledgeable Doctor Lyndon Shobley this weekend while dining at the Bournemouth Social Democratic Party clubhouse. Doctor Shobley is well known to those abreast of contemporary linguistics, to his colleagues at the University of Bournemouth and, increasingly, to SDP members for his enthusiastic advocacy of his theory of tempelinguistics.

This was the subject of our conversation for the duration of the evening and, with little research on the theory of tempelinguistics currently in the public domain (Shobley tells me that the journals are hopelessly rapacious in their protection of copyright) I have decided, with the good Doctor’s permission, to sketch a general outline of his theory here, so that it might gain wider recognition and further advocates.

The following is a condensed version of our conversation over dinner and is not, nor pretends to be, a comprehensive theory of tempelinguistics, the task of which would be beyond the scope and ability of this publication. Any reader who wishes to acquaint himself more intimately with Doctor Shobley’s work, and with tempelinguistics in general, would do well to read his work directly, and will find ample signposting to it in the footnotes of this short article. 

THEORY OF TEMPELINGUISTICS

It will have escaped few people’s notice that the Spanish, Portuguese and, to some extent, the French, are slack-jawed peoples who tend to keep their mouths agape, even between utterances. Conversely, the German, Dutch and English are known to be tight-lipped people who, in extreme cases, barely open their mouths even while speaking. 

Those with some familiarity with the respective languages of these peoples will have drawn some linguistic parallels: that, while the former group’s language tends to emphasise vowel sounds (those are: a, e, i, o, and u) the latter tends to lean more heavily toward producing consonants (those are: b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, y, z), particularly the labial, dental, alveolar and post-alveolar consonants, which the reader will already be familiar with.

The general theory, accepted until now, would attribute this respective looseness or tightness of the speaker’s mouth to the language which they must speak. But such a theory fails to consider the origin of said differences between languages, as well as those differences that exist in dialects within said languages. The theory of tempelinguistics proposes that at least some of these differences may be explained by the climate in which these speakers have historically found themselves.

We have noted already the theory that speakers of Spanish and Portuguese tend to let their mouths hang open in order to accommodate their vowel-heavy utterances. But tempelinguistics makes the simple claim that this “agape-ness” of the Spanish and Portuguese came before rather than after the development of their language. In crude terms, the mediterranean languages have developed to fit the mouths of a people who have, historically, panted with heat and dehydration, while Germanic and Scandinavian tongues, with their greater emphasis on closed-mouth consonants, find their basis in the colder, more shiver-inducing climates in which they have developed.

Regional differences to support this theory are numerous. In Spain, the regional language of Galician, developed in Spain’s milder and windier northwestern coast, has greater commonality with Germanic pronunciation, having as it does a “toothier” or more “biting” utterances, comparable to those in English. The historically dehydrated inhabitants of Andalucia, on Spain’s hotter Southern coast, have, conversely, difficulty even pronouncing the voiceless alveolar fricative (s), preferring instead the raspy, voiceless dental fricative (θ), so that “silla” (s/i:/j/ʌ) becomes instead “thilla” (θ/i:/j/ʌ).

We need not go as far as the Iberian peninsular to find concrete cases of tempelinguistics. Even in England’s colder regions, such as Lancashire, the people are wider mouthed, and often bare their teeth as primates do before attacking. This natural expression of the Lancashirian may too be an adaption to the colder, windier climate, bearing some resemblance as it does to the face one pulls when a sharp, cold gust of air hits one’s face. If this baring of teeth has, as it has with primates, contributed to the erroneous belief that England’s northerners are friendly, it is also responsible for the substitution of the phoneme (:ɔ) in the standard “alright” with (a:), as in “aahrigh’?”.

Further examples in English exist, but many are too intertwined with other fields of linguistics for us to consider them from a purely tempelinguistic perspective. For example, the wide-mouthed, vowel-heavy dialect of Australia — unusual among anglophones — might be attributed to some extent to the extreme temperatures experienced on that continent. But evidence also exists to show that the slack pronunciation of the Australian people might also be attributed to their criminal genetics or enthusiastic tendency to inebriate themselves, and here we find too great an overlap with genetelinguistics and toxilinguistics to produce any valuable data in the field of tempelinguistics.

Further funding is needed, but we have already discovered some practical applications for the theory. At the University of Bournemouth, we have run controlled experiments with students of both Spanish and German using the class thermostat. Students of Spanish have been subjected to extreme temperatures with the intention of replicating conditions in Spain and Latin America, while students of German have sat their last few lessons in the university canteen’s sausage larder. Teachers of both classes have reported not only an improvement in spoken grammatical accuracy, spontanaeity of utterances and accuracy of pronunciation, but also significant improvement in student engagement. With continued exposure and association, we are hopeful that we will be able to return the students to comfortable conditions, without losing any of these advantages occasioned by the environment, by next Spring.

FURTHER READING

Barnham, F and Shobley, L. B. (2012) Investigation into second generation bilingual Portuguese and English Speakers raised in Slough. Bournemouth: Bournemouth University Press.

Shobley, L. B. (2017) Linguistic Temperature Therapy: A study of the effects of prolonged high temperature in octegenarian learners of Italian (single blind study). Bournemouth: Bournemouth University Press.

Shobley, L. B. (2013) Investigation on the correlation between dehydration and lisping: Twelve Iberian urine samples. Bournemouth: Bournemouth University Press.

Shobley, L. B. (2016) Dancing With the Wind: A Memoir. Bournemouth: Self Published.

Shobley, L. B. (2018) Chattering: A study of the linguistics effects of prolonged exposure to cold in eighteen year old Romanian au pairs (blind study, single participant). Unpublished.