Re: Why Consonants?

On Sat, Feb 17, 2007 at 02:06:36PM -0800, Leon Lin wrote:
> Hi,
>
> H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >Or, for that matter, look at Pinyin.
>   ??? I don't get what you mean by that. Pinyin has little vowels.
I was referring to letter forms. Your original obeservation about
ascenders/descenders is really only valid for the English alphabet.


>   >Consonants' POA (point-of-articulation) are more well-defined...
>
>   I agree, but there a lot less distinguishable, at least to me...
[...]

Only in a noisy environment. Probably because they are not syllabic
peaks (or tend not to be), and so they are easily distorted by
background noise. But many more contrasts can be made in consonants than
vowels.


T

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