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Re: Introduction to FourHorse

From:Shreyas Sampat <nsampat@...>
Date:Thursday, June 21, 2001, 12:18
>What I'd call a velar whistle is a relatively low-pitched whistle with a >constriction in the back of the mouth (you can get even lower pitched >whistles, which I guess would be uvular) and rounded lips with a very small >opening between the lips. A labialized voiceless velar approximant? The tip >and front of the tongue are then free to move around and change the volume >of the resonant cavity (changing the pitch), and even to add gestures like >tonguing, taps, and trills. With practice you can control pitch to a fairly >good degree of accuracy and speed. *Trilled* whistles, though possible, are >probably too difficult to use as human speech sounds, but who knows what >non-human mouths are capable of?
Hmm... trilled whistles are cool things. You're probably right that they, and whistles in general, too complex to be used as human speech sounds, though; after about the palatal "hiss", I start failing to be able to produce them. (What a verb form!) It seems that these nonhuman mouths of ours tend to be able to produce increasingly exotic speech sounds: the famous insect clicks and whirrs, these whistles and trills, the ejective and implosive sounds of the more exotic human tongues. I wonder now if there are conlangs that make distinctions more fine: I was pondering at one point a phonemic distinction between apical and coronal /s/, but came to the conclusion that reasonably humanoid speakers (those that use human- speakable speech sounds, at any rate) would probably conflate those into a series of homophonous words with double meanings. I'm told that Malayalam has five <n>s. And so forth. P.S. This post, in its ending, seems to not truly contain any information. How stressful. --- Shreyas

Replies

Danny Wier <dawier@...>
claudio <claudio.soboll@...>morphems ?