Re: Conlang baby-talk

On 28 Jan, Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> En réponse à Dan Sulani <dnsulani@...>:
>
> >
> >     It gets even stranger, Christophe, as evidenced by the following
> > [very bad]  joke:
> >
> > Parent to child: What does T-O-O spell?
> > Child:  /tu/.
> > Parent: And what is one plus one?
> > Child: /tu/.
> > Parent: And who wrote Tom Sawyer?
> > Child: /twejn/.
> > Parent: Now say it all together!
> > Child: [obvious result! ;-) ]
> > Parent: Very good! Tomorrow I'll teach
> >             you how to say "airplane"!
> >
> > [Now all together --- groan!  :-)  ]
> >
>
> Groan! Well, that must be the worst joke I ever heard in this century ;)))
> (luckily for you, this century is still young ;)) ).
    < G >


> >     Just thought I'd be pedantic and point out that it's no cliche.
>
> Well, that it's true doesn't mean that it's not overused to the point of
> cliche ;) .
    True.

> >     OTOH, it _is_ possible to produce them without teeth.
> > I've even seen a (speech therapy documentary) movie
> > where a man _without a tongue_ managed to make acceptable-
> > sounding "sibilants" (to this day, I still can't understand how he did
> > it!)
> >
>
> How can you achieve to pronounce *any* consonant (any speech sound for
that
> matter) without a tongue? I thought it was the main instrument of speech
in the
> mouth (nearly all speech sounds depend on a certain position of the tongue
to
> be pronounced correctly).

    The man lost his tongue to cancer as an adult.
So he knew what target sounds he needed.
The key words here are "acceptable-sounding".
He obviously didn't produce the same sounds as
normal speakers. But, somehow, he was able to
learn to use what remained of his speech system
to produce _similar_ sounds. _We_ can't do it
because we _do_ have our tongues and they
interfere with the acoustics produced by
manipulating the floor of the mouth, the cheeks,
the soft palate/uvula, the throat, teeth, and even the lips.
    Speaking of lips, I suspect that there was
a degree of bilabial fricatives involved
in his production of "sibilants".

Dan Sulani
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A word is an awesome thing.