“My name is Steve Kleinedler, supervising editor for the American Heritage Dictionary, where I have worked since 1997. One of my many responsibilities is pronunciation. The tattoo is a stylized version of a phonetic vowel chart — it shows the relative position of the tongue in the mouth when those vowel sounds are articulated. I had a smaller, simpler version done on my upper back in 1993, and I’ve been wanting to get the full version for quite some time.
“The design is by Kyle Nelson of Stoltze Design and the tattoo artist was Mike Helz of Stingray Body Art.”
December 26th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
For the life of me I cannot figure out what the red circles are for…
December 26th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
For the life of me I cannot figure out what the red circles are for…
They’re the cardinal vowels; the ones with the double circles are at the ends of the front/back and open/close spectra.
December 26th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
I want something simple and elegant like a moebius strip someday.
December 26th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
The red circles are part of what make the chart “stylized”. The designer took the basic chart and added some artistic elements. I mentioned I liked subway maps, and he ran with that.
January 8th, 2010 at 9:28 am
Looks good. I wonder whether it would be worth having a consonant chart done too.
April 14th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
As a linguistics student, I got extremely excited when I saw this vowel quadrangle. In January, a friend and I both had wugs done.