Materiow World

Go and listen carefully to Madonna’s Material World. If you haven’t watched the video in a good while, now’s a great time:

Hear that chorus?

‘Cuz we are living in a material world
And I am a material girl

Poignant. Funny. Timely. 1984 was incredibly material. I remember that about the 80s.

But wait a sec. Are we so sure she’s saying “material” there? Doesn’t it sound more like…. materio? Materiow?

What’s going on here?

What’s going on is that vowels and consonants, once considered by yours truly to be as separate as apples and tardigrades, are actually very closely related. They can even be interchanged with one another during certain special cases, and you can really hear this in other languages besides English.

A native Brazilian won’t really describe their homeland as “Bruh-Zill”, as an American might say it. It’s going to sound a lot more like "brah-zee-yo” if you’re truly listening to it for the first time, or maybe “brah-zeow.” As a kid, I learned that hard-and-fast rule about consonants like the letter L or W being like vowel sandwiches, with the vowels being distinct from consonants and never the twain shall meet.

Except for the letter Y, which could sometimes make the same sounds that the letter I made in certain situations, vowels were supposed to stay in their own lane.

Yet here was Madonna, telling me these rules didn’t always apply.

One clue that Material World provides is the way the phrase flows when you say it with an open letter. If you simply say “material world”, there is a necessary moment where your mouth gets hung up on the end of the word material. It’s the shift from the L sound to the hard W sound you need to start world that makes this take so long to say.

By comparison, if you say “materio world”, you can kind of use the same ending sound of the first word to flow right into the second word. The way Madonna says it, materioworld becomes a new word, smoothing over the rough seam so that they flow together much, much better.

Here I am a few months back (my hair is longer now), learning Brazilian Portuguese. My facial expressions give a good idea of what’s going on in my mind here (you might need to turn the volume up a bit to hear the DuoLingo voice; sorry about that!):

Yet, Portuguese has helped me to see these connections elsewhere, including in English. This linguistic phenomenon is called phonetic smoothing, and once you realize it’s a thing, you can’t help seeing it everywhere.

Vowels are consonants, and we are living in a materiow world.