Re: Why Consonants?

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. 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] :)

* 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.

> > consonants as the major indentifier for words. Here are some
> > observations:
>
> 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).

...
> This appears to be because there tend to be more consonantal phonemes
> than vocalic, so leaving out consonants gives you much less information
> than leaving out vowels.
This, I think, is what it comes down to.

--
Tristan.

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