Phonetic palindrome

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A phonetic palindrome is a portion of sound or phrase of speech which is identical or roughly identical when reversed.

Some phonetic palindromes must be mechanically reversed, involving the use of sound recording equipment or reverse tape effects. Another, more abstract type are words which are identical to the original when separated into their phonetic components (according to a system such as the International Phonetic Alphabet) and reversed.

In English, certain written palindromes also happen to be phonetic palindromes, particularly monosyllabic ones such as mom, dad, and pip. However, this does not guarantee that a reversed recording of any of these words will sound identical to non-reversed speech, because certain pronunciations can cause a shift in the articulation of the vowel, differentiating the beginning from the end in its pitch.

[edit] Examples

The Hungarian A bátya gatyába ("The brother in underpants") and the Japanese Ta-ke-ya-bu ya-ke-ta (竹薮焼けた — "A bamboo grove has been burned") are phonetic palindromes. The Hungarian phrase is a true palindrome because 'ty' is originally one letter, although there are two characters in the Romanization. It is like other special characters in other languages, such as ç, ň, but instead of using symbols above or under the character, Hungarian rather uses more characters combined with each other.

A rare known palindrome in which a recorded phrase of speech sounds the same when it is played backwards was discovered by the composer John Oswald in 1974 while he was working on audio tape versions of the cut-up technique using recorded readings by William S. Burroughs. Oswald discovered that in repeated instances of Burroughs speaking the phrase "I got", that the recordings sound nearly identical whether played backward or forward.