Re: Why Consonants?

On Sat, Feb 17, 2007 at 09:56:56AM +1100, T. A. McLeay wrote:
> On 17/02/07, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...> wrote:
> >On Fri, Feb 16, 2007 at 02:03:45PM -0500, Leon Lin wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> It always seemed to me that vowels are more distinct and clear than
> >> consonants (does everyone agree on this (imagine talking and listening
> >> over a phone with static)), but many languages have evolved to using
>
> That's probably for two reasons:
>
> * Vowels are longer, in general, and require more precision than your
> average (stop) consonant. With a stop consonant, which are the most
> common, you just bash your articulator in the general direction you
> want to go as fast as you can. Voila! you have a stop.
Probably why vowels tend to change faster than consonants.


> With a vowel, you have to more carefully position your tongue lest you
> say /e/ instead of /ɪ/ or whatever close pair your language has. Also,
> a stream of vowels with a few consonants added in is a lot more
> comfortable to say that a stream of consonants with a few vowels...
> try saying a sentence-worth of words like [ptps@k@n] :)
Try telling that to, e.g., a Czech speaker... ;-) Even Russian has such
lovely words such as встретить [fstrjet^jit^j] and взгляд [vzgljat].
Stick on a consonantal preposition and you get lovely combinations like
к взрослому ["gvzroclVmu].


> * Also, the important accoustic information of vowels is in relatively
> low frequencies, whereas particularly with fricatives (which require
> very high precision) a lot of it's relatively high. Telephones only
> have very low bandwidth, and so high frequencies are cut off. You'd
> probably find if you were using a high-pass filter, /i/ and /æ/ would
> be harder to distinguish than with a telephone, but /f/ and /s/ would
> be much easier.
Interesting.


[...]
> >Vowels are more prone to change. Well, at least for most of the
> >languages I know. :-)
>
> This came up on the list some time ago, and someone observed that the
> opposite is true for Spanish: Vowels are (apparently) pronounced quite
> consistently between dialects, which are distinguished largely on the
> basis of consonants (pronounciation of frex ll, j, z, -s).
[...]

Interesting, I didn't know this before. I wonder what causes some
languages to change vowels faster than consonants, or vice versa.

PS. Heh, my Perl script seems to have picked up on this whole sound
change business... Does this mean that a conlang for sentient vending
machines would not undergo sound change? ;-)


T

--
Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.