Re: Alphabet

En réponse à Jesse Bangs <jaspax@...>:

>
> > with a "hard (voiceless)" marker and
> > a "don't open your mouth (nasal)" marker to
> > differentiate.
>
> 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.
>
Your thinking is somehow twisted then. Physically, voiceless sounds are
definitively 'harder' than voiced sounds. To produce a voiceless sound, you
must tense your vocal chords so that they don't vibrate, while in a voiced
sound, the vocal chords are left untensed, and thus vibrate naturally because
of the passage of air. Thus you need more energy to produce a voiceless sound
than a voiced sound. Or at least that's how I feel it. Of course, I'm not
talking about creaky voiced or breathy voiced sounds where you put some energy
to somehow 'enhance' the voicing. There are also acoustical reasons to consider
that voiceless sounds are 'harder' than voiced sounds. Basically it has to do
with the fact that voiceless sounds stop modify more the air stream than voiced
sounds. You can hear it for instance when you try to pronounce [ata] or [ada].
In the first case, the airflow sounds very much stopped between the vowels,
while in the second, it sounds more regular and constant.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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