Re: Alphabet

David Peterson wrote:


>     Well, say [t] and [d] in isolation, and you can see.  ;)
I see nothing new.


> [d] requires
> that you put some effort into it, whereas you could say [t] without doing
> anything.
What does that prove?  A caress requires much more effort than a punch too.


> Plus, [d] is LOUDER.  Everyone seems to want to ignore that point.
I don't know the statistics, but I'm not sure about that.  I find an
aspired /t/ to be no less loud than a /d/.  An /s/ is definitely louder
than a /z/.

I'm singing in a choir.  Have you ever tried singing an /s/ where you're
not supposed to?  You can hear that across a whole cathedral.

Then again, what does volume have to do with hardness?  When you go into
a club where the music is too loud, you'll find that a bass hurts your
ears much less that the cryogenic needles of percussion.  That's what I
call hard.


>  A sound being louder causes it to seem harder if it's a stop.  As for [f]
> and [v], I have no idea what you're talking about.  [f] sounds like a cloud;
> [v] like ripping paper.
Wrong.  [f] sounds like ripping paper, not [v].  You must be suffering
from some major speech impediment.

As for clouds, I don't listen to them a lot, so I can't argue.  ;-)


> You have to lose your phonetics training in order to see this, I think.
Which phonology training?  I'm a physicist.  =P


> Forget about the way these things look on a spectrogram.  With fricatives,
> think of how they feel, and with stops, think about how they sound.
That's what I'm doing.  I'm using the physical aspect only to
demonstrate the obvious to the blind ones.  ;-)


> In Spanish, the voiced stops are barely stops
> at all, in most places.
In other words, they're very soft.  =)


>     Also, I really like the whispering example.  :)
Try taping a whisper and playing it at regular speaking volume.  It
sounds like sandpaper.


>     Yeah, this is a very good point.  And also, even if you still can't
> comprehend how this thing could come about, just remember that it makes sense
> to not just someone, but quite a large group of people, which means the
> metaphor is in there *somewhere* (the brain, I mean).
Yeah.  And the common metaphor is to use "hard" for unvoiced.  So there
are many other people who think like I do.  =)

Anyway, I think we should just agree to disagree on this, lest someone
get hurt.  =P


-- Christian Thalmann