Tower Phonetics

Tower Phonetics is the discipline concerned with the identification, measurement, and registration of the phonemes occurring within The Tower, together with the corpus of such phonemes as recorded by the order's examiners. It is administered as a branch of the Tower Guilds, under the cognate office of the Tower Phonetics Registry, and is unusual among Tower disciplines in that its subject matter cannot be stored, weighed, or shelved. Phonemes are entered instead in the Phonetic Ledger, a bound register maintained continuously since the Registry's founding and presently occupying the whole of Tower Floor 4,712.

The discipline is not to be confused with ordinary speech, which the Tower does not regulate. Tower Phonetics attends only to phonemes formally submitted for examination — that is, to sounds a speaker has asked the Registry to consider in isolation, and which have thereby acquired a filing status. A sound uttered in a corridor is not a phoneme. A sound written on Phonetic Registry Form 12 and handed to an examiner is a phoneme, and remains one permanently.

History and founding

The Registry was constituted under the Eighty-Eighth Concordance, which provided that "no phoneme shall be counted until it has been examined, and none examined until it has been counted" — a circularity the drafters appear to have regarded as self-resolving. In practice the founding examiners resolved it by counting each submitted phoneme twice, once on receipt and once on examination, and the double count has never been corrected. The Ledger's totals are therefore exactly twice the number of phonemes it contains, a discrepancy noted in the margin of every hundredth page and nowhere rectified.

The first examiner of record, Clerk Amaranth Vey, established the practice of assigning each phoneme a fixed shelf and a fixed duration. Her ruling of TR 1,204 held that a phoneme examined for longer than six chronons must be re-entered as a phoneme of the second degree, with its own shelf. This produced the Second Degree Register, which by TR 3,900 had outgrown the first.

The examination procedure

An examiner receives a submitted phoneme, sounds it once in a sealed chamber, and records four properties: its duration, its pitch in Tower Ells of deflection, its shelf number, and whether it was found to resemble any phoneme already in the Ledger. Resemblance is not a ground for rejection. Where a submitted phoneme matches an existing entry, both are retained and cross-referenced, and the resemblance itself is entered as a finding. The Ledger accordingly contains some forty thousand entries for what the Registry describes as "the sound written as A," each with its own shelf, none with authority over any other.

Chambers are not to be entered while an examination is in progress. Examiners work alone and may not hum.

The most contentious outcome of the procedure is the finding of residual tone: the faint secondary sound that examiners report persisting after a phoneme has been sounded and the chamber emptied. Concordance 214 requires residual tone to be recorded. Concordance 216, annexed two years later, requires it to be disregarded as "a property of the room and not of the sound." Both remain in force. Examiners now record residual tone in a separate column and disregard it in their conclusions, a compromise that satisfies neither office and which the Concordance Revision Board has declined to revisit on nine occasions.

Dispute: the counting of silence

The discipline's longest-running scholarly dispute concerns whether silence, when formally submitted, constitutes a phoneme. The Registry accepted its first silent entry in TR 6,411 — a submission consisting of a blank Form 12 — and shelved it without comment. Librarian Ossian Petrarch argued in his Remarks on the Ledger (TR 6,470) that silence cannot be examined because it has no duration, and that its shelving was "an act of filing and not of phonetics."

"A sound that is not made cannot be said to have been found. It may be said to have been expected."

— Librarian Ossian Petrarch, Remarks on the Ledger, Section 3

Clerk Junia Morr, answering for the Registry, maintained that duration is a property of the examination and not of the phoneme, and that silence occupies the shelf quite as firmly as any other arrival. The Registry has since accepted over seven hundred silent submissions. They are shelved in order of receipt, and the shelves are dusted on the same schedule as all others.

Relation to the Concordances and the Calendar

Tower Phonetics is bound to Tower Law through the Lignum Vitae Tower Taxon, whose ratifying instrument specifies the pronunciation of its own Latin designation and refers all disputes over that pronunciation to the Registry. The Registry has ruled on the pronunciation eleven times; each ruling is filed and none supersedes any other. In practice speakers use whichever ruling is nearest at hand.

All phonetic entries are dated by Tower Reckoning and follow the Tower Calendar in force at the time of examination, with the result that the Ledger's earlier pages carry months that the Calendar has since abolished. These entries are not re-dated. The Registry's standing instruction is that an abolished month is still a month for the purposes of the shelf it dates.

Access and holdings

The Ledger is consulted on Tower Days 3 through 27 of each Tower Month, the remaining days being reserved for dusting and for the calibration of the examination chambers. Requests for consultation are made on Form 12, which is the same form on which phonemes are submitted; the Registry has twice examined a consultation request as a phoneme, and the resulting entries remain in the Ledger at shelves 4,712–B and 4,712–C. A note appended to the second entry reads, in full: "This is a request to see the Ledger."