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Re: Alphabet

From:Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>
Date:Friday, November 2, 2001, 12:59
Jesse Bangs wrote:

> Why do people often think of the voiceless sounds as "hard" and the > voiced ones as "soft"? I've always thought of it the other way around.
It completely escapes my understanding how anyone could consider [t] to be softer than [d], or [f] softer than [v]. Try saying [afata] and [avada], that should make it clear. In the first utterance, the consonants interrupt the flow of the word with percussive unvoicedness, while the second word glides off the tongue in a single soft mellifluous curve. As for the physical aspect: Unvoiced consonants have a lot of high-frequency spikes, like percussion instruments in music, while voiced ones have much smoother Fourier signatures, like plucked strings. Surely nobody would consider a violin pizzicato harder than a drum solo? -- Christian Thalmann

Replies

Muke Tever <alrivera@...>
Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>