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When I was young and still learning to read, I often saw "tsk tsk" in print, and pronounced it "tisk tisk." Somewhere along the way a kind soul pointed out to me that it was actually pronounced as a clicking sound by snapping the tongue off the upper palate. I already knew and used that clicking sound, but that's when the light went on and I realized there was sometimes a need to "spell" sounds that could be "pronounced," but couldn't really be properly spelled using any combination of letters in the English alphabet.
I realize that clicking sounds are common in some other languages, and likely have their own special symbols/letters in those languages.
So my question is: what is the formal name or description for the situation where this happens … words that can be pronounced but not formally spelled? I'm sure there must be other examples.
[later edit]
I did find this commentary ("tsk" is mentioned in the very last paragraph):
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CE4D71E31F93BA15750C0A96F958260
and this very interesting discussion of "achoo," the sound of a sneeze:
http://www.thereeltodd.com/2008/08/sneezing-achoo.html
But still no info about what the phenomena is called. Notoriously difficult to Google. I'm waiting for some wisdom here …
Yes, I see the problem with trying to Google it: it's virtually impossible to form a description that would lead to the right answer, assuming that it exists. How frustrating.
Incidentally, my wife is invariably an ah-chooer. Always I'm tempted to ridicule, always I think better of it. I tend to do something more like hud-ztheeyah.
Peter
I've read a few books in which "tsk tsk" is written as "making a clucking sound."
The only reference I found was Examples Of Onomatopoeia
Add: "uh-huh," "huh-uh," "uh-uh," "huh," "hmm," and "hmph". And I'd like to see someone spell the "I don't know" sound that accompanies a shrug and a stupid look – a long "uhhhh" with a rise and fall in it.
telemath said:
And I'd like to see someone spell the "I don't know" sound that accompanies a shrug and a stupid look – a long "uhhhh" with a rise and fall in it.
Yeah, that's a great example. It's all about inflection and not pronunciation. Yet when you hear it, the meaning is always apparent. In my search for an answer to the original question, I discovered that in some Eastern languages an inflection actually changes the meaning, but I have no idea how those inflections are captured in the spelling. I don't speak Mandarin.
I was frustrate by online searches for an answer. For example, a search for "words that can't be spelled" got 980 hits. Invariably, those hits were talking about the failings of phonetics/phonics. "Sounds that can't be spelled" fared even worse.
This might turn out to be one of those questions best called-in to the show. Surely Grant or Martha would have some insights.
I suppose "hmm", "ah", "ha" and "ah-hah" belong in this list. I'm not sure about some other intejections: "wow", for example.
In the USA, "mm" means something non-committal unless accompanied by body language (say a head movement); in Britain, judging by the novels I read, it usually means "yes".
(I said "non-verbal", but are they? "Uh-huh", "uh-uh" and so on may not exactly be words, but they represent words. Maybe I should call them something different.)
By the way, there are two sounds made by the tongue against the roof of the mouth, and I don't think "tsk tsk" was meant to indicate the one that I'd describe as a clucking sound. These sounds are difficult to describe well, but the one I'm thinking of might be called a "ts" sound made by sucking air in rather than expelling it; it's made to indicate sympathy, which matches with "tsk, tsk" and does not match the clucking sound children make.
Oh, wait, Heimhenge said "clicking", not "clucking". Ok, there are three sounds made with the tongue off the roof of the mouth.
Damn, Bob, you must have a lotta time on your hands … that was a pretty old post you replied to.
I agree that a "click" and a "cluck" are different sounds, both made via inhalation. So could Bill Clinton do them? 
Since that post, I've learned there are several languages, mostly in Africa but also in Asia and Australia, that use those sounds as part of their spoken vocabulary. What I haven't learned is, for those languages that have a written form, if/how those sounds are represented in text. You'd think that, if you can say it, you should be able to write it.
Christmas of 2010 I went into the hospital with what I thought was ordinary pneumonia, and didn't regain consciousness for a month. I woke up paralyzed and partly stupid, and wasn't able to manage a keyboard until April. I finally returned to WayWord only a couple months ago, I think. So one of the things I started doing, when no one has posted in a while, is go back and read some things I missed while I was away. I haven't finished catching up yet 
.
I've seen written versions of some of those African languages; for some of those odd sounds they use '!', '*' and the like. I don't know enough about any of those languages to tell you which characters are commonly used to represent which sounds. But generally speaking it looks sort of like this:
Tsa!a ma tole!a ko*sa-me.
I just made that up, but you get the idea. I imagine if we looked we could find actual examples.
Damn, Bob, now I feel like an ass for my comment about "too much time on your hands." Glad to hear you're recovered from that episode.
When I was pondering sounds that had no official spellings I encountered what I believe are called consonant digraphs. These are consonant combinations that are pronounced as a single sound. Examples: CH, ST, BR, etc. I was looking for a way to spell that clicking/clucking sound.
Then it occurred to me that there are several perfectly good consonant combinations that are pronounceable, but as far as I can tell, unused in the English language. Examples: TL and HR.
Well, the HR I've seen, in only one case. It was a C.S. Lewis story called "Out of the Silent Planet." There was this fictitious race of beings called hrossa.
But other than that, seems like some perfectly useable sounds have never been used, at least in English. Can anyone else suggest other unused but pronounceable consonant combinations?
Bob Bridges said:
Christmas of 2010 I went into the hospital with what I thought was ordinary pneumonia, and didn't regain consciousness for a month. I woke up paralyzed and partly stupid, and wasn't able to manage a keyboard until April. I finally returned to WayWord only a couple months ago, I think. So one of the things I started doing, when no one has posted in a while, is go back and read some things I missed while I was away. I haven't finished catching up yet
I've seen written versions of some of those African languages; for some of those odd sounds they use '!', '*' and the like. I don't know enough about any of those languages to tell you which characters are commonly used to represent which sounds. But generally speaking it looks sort of like this:
Tsa!a ma tole!a ko*sa-me.
I just made that up, but you get the idea. I imagine if we looked we could find actual examples.
I think I can safely say that we're all glad you're back with us and feeling better.
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) has ways to represent several clicks, including some of the ones we are discussing above:
IPA chart — check out the Non-Pulmonics section, left column are clicks.
Non-pulmonics with audio examples, top row are clicks
I believe the tsk-tsk sound is the laminal alveolar fricated ("dental") which is represented by what I would call a "vertical pipe" | on a computer keyboard. The exclamation point ! is for the apical (post)alveolar abrupt ("retroflex") which, I think, is a "cluck." The horsey giddy-up sound is a double vertical pipe || lateral alveolar fricatated ("lateral").
Ron Draney said:
And the bilabial fricated click, represented by a circle with a dot in the middle, is the "smooch".
HA! Clever. And I always thought that was just spelled XXX. Or is that XOX?
Glen, that's a fascinating link. I didn't even know there was an IPA. Seems like it covers pretty much all the sounds that can come out of a human. Still, I suppose there will always be those sounds that end up getting spelled out, in parentheses or whatever. Like sigh, ahem, and gasp. The malleability of the written word never ceases to amaze me.
LOL—don't sweat it, Heimhenge. The story is true, but I was also consciously having fun throwing it in your face ("so there!"), so you shouldn't feel too guilty.
The fact is, once the doctors decided they had my ARDS under control, sort of, and were ready to wake me up, they discontinued the sedation but I didn't wake up. They did an EEG, and after a few days' delay informed my family that I was brain-dead, apparently from loss of oxygen during the worst of my ARDS. Some of my kids drove up to Indianapolis from North Carolina, but instead of saying goodbye to me as the doctors had in mind they laid hands on me and prayed for me. I opened my eyes that day and started looking around in response to sounds, and they say I also blinked yes-and-no answers to questions as well. But I don't remember any of that; it was another week or two before all my dreams, delusions and outright hallucinations settled down enough that I could remember (more or less) what was going on. It was quite a bit longer before I was all there mentally speaking. In fact, they tell me there's one symptom they explained to me multiple times and I never retained it; I could swear the first time I was ever told was months later, in late May, a few weeks after I'd been discharged from the hospital and was in physical therapy.
Back to our show: CS Lewis was a linguist, as you may know, or a "philologist" as they were called then. (Unless someone knows there's a difference between the two disciplines? I'm not sure.) So I'm not surprised he came up with that combination—though as I recall, the hrossa because of their physiology slapped an initial 'h' sound on a lot of words that the other two sentient species of their world did not. The hrossa referred to themselves as hrossa; the seroni said simply "rossa".
As for "tl-", you're right that we don't use it in English, but the Tlingits do. Meanwhile we use 's-' in lots and lots of words, but the Spanish don't, which is why a heavily accented Spaniard says he speaks "espanish" and calls his burro "estupido". It's worse: We get a lot of words that start with 'sk-' from the Scandinavians, which doesn't happen at all in the Romance languages; the French word for "staircase" is escalier (like our "escalator"), but nowhere in the Romance languages will you find a word like "scared", "screech" or "skin" or a name like "Sklar". But the Scandinavians have words starting with "hl-", which we don't use at all. We have lots of words starting with "sh-", but all the words starting with "shm-", as far as I know, come to us directly from Yiddish and Hebrew, and most of the words like "schnell" and "schnapps" are Germanic. (Well, so is English.)
Sorry, I find this fascinating. There are perfectly good sounds out there that we never use! Here's one: Purse your lips and breath out as though blowing gently on a fire. Now close your teeth and make the same breath, still through closely pursed lips. Feel that sound? It's sort of like an 'f', but not exactly. Betcha it isn't in that IPA...which I confess I haven't looked at in a long while. Come to think of it, how would I know whether it's in there or not? It probably has a name like "algeolic mycosohedral fricative (dentral)", which wouldn't mean a thing to me.
I have just a few points of clarification.
Si, señor. Spanish does have initial s-. The initial blends st-, sp-, sc-, etc. in English are at issue.
In addition, French does have ski (faire du ski, skieur, skieuse) and a few other borrowed sk- words (e.g. ska). But they certainly don't have the rich infusion of sk- words found in English. Some Romance languages alter the spelling of ski, such as Romanian schi, but pronounce it similarly. Italian spells it as sci, and pronounces it like English she.
But at this point we need to distinguish the discussion of sounds and the discussion of spelling. Several Romance languages have initial /sk-/ sounds, though not spelled in that way. (e.g. scandal = French scandale, Italian scandalo, Romanian scandal)
I stand corrected; you're right, of course, Spanish does have initial-s words, just not 'sp-' and the others you listed.
French adopted "ski", but it isn't a Romance word; they got it from the Nordic languages (just as we got "schmuck", "schmutz" and "shlep" from Yiddish).
I hadn't thought about "sc-" words, though. I've pretty much taken for granted that any Romance word with a 'k' or 'w' in it (such as whiskey and weekend) came from some other language first. That's true with a lot of 'c' words, too; "ektopik" and "elektroenkefalograf" are spelled with 'c's and 'ph's in English because they came to us through Latin, even though they were originally Greek. But of course I mustn't cast the net too broadly.
By the way, I didn't know the Italians spell it "sci", but if they do then I'm betting they pronounce it not "shee" but "s(tch)ee". In many languages, and not just the Romance languages, 'c' and 'g' and sometimes 'k' and even 't' are softened before 'i' and 'e', but hard before 'a', 'o' and 'u'. In Italian 'c' becomes "tch". I'm not sure Italian even has a "sh" sound, and if they'd wanted to pronounce it "skee" they would have spelled it "schi", no?
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