Spoonerisms may offer clue to origins of speech

PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 14 (UPI) -- Spoonerisms -- the involuntary transfer of sounds from one word to another within a sentence -- are actually clues that language arose from primitive sounds made by our evolutionary ancestors, a University of Texas researcher says.

Peter MacNeilage says we can only switch the sounds around -- as in the old phrase ``let me sew you to a sheet'' -- because our words follow a form derived from the lip-smacking sounds made by our ape-like forebears.

He said currently accepted theories about how language evolved -- that it's an innately human trait based on special brain characteristics -- don't explain spoonerisms, which are named after an absent-minded British clergyman who was famous for them.

The sounds that come out in a spoonerism always sound like words, he said, with consonants and vowels in the right places even if the whole sentence is nonsense. What's more, spoonerisms are confined to speech, rather than other forms of communication.

``We don't do that when we're typing,'' he asked, ``so why do we do it when we're speaking?''

The answer, he said, is that we have no choice -- words began with the action of opening and closing the mouth, starting and ending with hard consonant-like sounds and with vowels in the middle.

The theory of innate language, he said, has a ``crucial omission'' -- it can't explain why spoonerisms happen.