That’s phonotactics–the study of sound sequences that do and do not occur in a given language. Some non-occurring sound sequences are simply unpronounceable and are not found in any language. Others are pronounceable but just don’t fit the idiosyncratic preferences of a particular language.

Lately The Name Inspector has noticed a bunch of names used in English-speaking contexts that don’t toe the line of normal English phonotactics. He suspects this is a new strategy for creating short names that are available as .com domains.

It’s really common for names to mess with orthography. That strategy is typical of Web 2.0 names (Flickr, Digg, Zooomr, etc.) and has been with us for a long time (Cheez Whiz). But phonology has been pretty sacred until now. While all the following names are pronounceable, they start with sound sequences that don’t occur syllable-initially in English, except in some borrowed words.

Zlio. This website allows you to instantly create an online affiliate store. It was in the news a while back because it got banned from Amazon.com. In English, the sequence zl- only occurs in the word zloty, the Polish currency unit.

Vlingo. This is a voice-to-text application for mobile devices. We English speakers see vl-at the beginning of a word only in the name Vladimir and in a tiny handful of obscure borrowed words.

Jwaala. An online banking tool. This name is based on a Sanskrit-derived word for ‘fire’. English has plenty of words in which j- is followed by the vowel -u- (e.g. juvenile), but none in which it’s followed by the related consonant -w-.

Srixon. The name of this golf ball manufacturer has a beginning that English speakers only find in the place name Sri Lanka.

How much farther can the phonological sensibilities of English speakers be pushed? As names become increasingly scarce, let’s wait and see.

Tags: zlio, the name zlio, vlingo, the name vlingo, jwaala, the name jwaala, srixon, the name srixon

The Name Inspector just learned about Incesoft, which claims on its website to be “the world’s leading provider of web robot technology”. Now, this is a Chinese company (which was selected for inclusion on the 2007 Red Herring 100 Asia list), so that’s a bit of an excuse, but…Incesoft? Is that the very best name they could come up with? Did they consider alternatives that evoked no primal human taboos in English and just find them too humdrum?

Even leaving aside the association with inappropriate intrafamilial contact, this is a terrible name. How are you supposed to pronounce it? If the first part is supposed to rhyme with the word wince, then the two syllables of this name are separated by an impossibly long hissing sound. It hardly helps to insert a little schwa sound for the e. But maybe there’s another pronunciation that makes more sense.

If there are Mandarin speakers reading this, please help The Name Inspector understand how this monstrosity might have come into existence. Is the Ince- part based on a transliteration of something nice? A family name perhaps?

Some naming companies offer a service that allows you to screen names in different languages. (The Name Inspector helped to develop just such a service at one of the companies where he worked). Incesoft perfectly demonstrates the need for this service. This name should have been vetted in English before being unleashed on the world. It’s for a global technology company, after all.

All this shows the downside of marketing on the web. It’s never been easier to create a global brand, and it’s never been easier to saddle yourself with a horrible name.

Tags: incesoft, the name incesoft, robots, web robots

We’re really getting a chance to enjoy the graphic possibilities of the letters i and j lately. If you’re a blogger you can put a Lijit Wijit on your blog. And now there’s Kijiji. Actually, there has been Kijiji for a while now in other countries, but eBay has just launched a U.S. version of this local classified ad network, putting them in direct competition with Craigslist.

Just look at all those dots and vertical lines. When the name is written in a serif font, as it is in the company logo, the dots look like heads, the vertical lines look like torsos, and the serifs look like arms reaching out in a welcoming embrace or unbridled enthusiasm or something else great like that. You would be forgiven for thinking that this unusual name was invented just to achieve this graphical effect. But actually kijiji is a Swahili word meaning ‘village’. It’s a diminutive form of the word mji, which means ‘town’. So it’s almost as if in Swahili they call a village a townlet.

Why choose Swahili for the name of an international network of classified ad sites? There are two good reasons. First, Swahili is a lingua franca–a common language used for business by speakers of other languages–in East Africa. Native speakers live in and around Tanzania.

Second, Swahili syllables tend to conform to what phonologists consider the universally preferred syllable structure, which is a single consonant followed by a single vowel, represented CV. (An exception is the first syllable of the word mji, which consists entirely of the nasal [m] sound. That may seem exotic, but in English we actually have syllables consisting only of nasal sounds, like the final syllable of the word button. We just don’t put those syllables at the beginnings of words.)

What does it mean for the CV syllable to be universally preferred? For one thing, it means kids produce this kind of syllable first when acquiring language. It also means that this kind of syllable is found throughout the languages of the world, while other kinds of syllable are more likely not to be allowed in this or that language. Most importantly, it means that in theory just about everybody in the world should find it pretty easy to pronounce this name.

About the first part of Kijiji: Have you studied French or Spanish or German or some other language and struggled with the system of grammatical gender? Well, if you didn’t enjoy that, steer clear of Swahili. It has more than ten genders, or noun classes, as they’re commonly called. Each noun starts with a prefix like ki- or m- showing its class. When a noun is used as a subject, verbs and some other words must be marked for agreement with its class prefix. At least the noun classes are based more on meaning than the random gender systems of other languages are, so it’s often easy to guess which class a word belongs to.

Anyway, The Name Inspector is getting off topic. How does this name do in English? Well, it’s actually a little hard to pronounce, preferred syllable structure notwithstanding. The two affricate sounds followed by high front vowels are kind of awkward to squeeze out. And despite the graphical gimmick of the name (or perhaps because of it), the orthography is a little hard to parse. When you see this name on the page or the screen, it looks like a bunch of scratches–it’s hard to distinguish the letters.

So this name makes perfect sense from a semantic and sociolinguistic point of view, but it suffers from the very orthographic and phonetic properties that make it special.

Tags: kijiji, the name kijiji, swahili, lijit, wijit, lingua franca, syllables