Re: Ventricular phonation

On Saturday, March 26, 2005, at 07:31 , william drewery wrote:

> Thank you, Ray.
You're welcome.

> I know that at least one form of diplophonic voice is a kind of "husky"
> voice quality sometimes found in body-builders. Apparently, this is
> brought on by abnormal enlargement of the ventricular folds due to heavy
> lifting.
Interesting - I did not know that.

> I also know they are sometimes involved as helping features in creaky and
> harsh voice phonations where they help dampen the true folds. All this
> implies to me that they can produce sounds on their own, but i've never
> heard a description of such sounds.
I suspect they can - but, like you, I have not heard or read a description.

> I've also seen the phrase "ventricular phonation" in voice pathology
> articles (a google search should pull up all sorts of stuff), but never
> seen a good description of what that is.
It seems the sounds are rare or, indeed, non-existent as phonemes in any
natlang - tho I would be happy to be proved wrong. My guess is that they
simply by themselves would not carry far and would be to easily lost by
any background interference.

> A conlang that I've been working on for the last three years makes
> extensive use of laryngeal, aryetenoid and pharyngeal articulations, and
> i'm hoping to find out more about the role of the false folds in sound
> production.
Sounds interesting - it does seem, however, your best source of
information about these sounds is likely to be found in voice pathology
articles. Good luck with your searches  :)
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On Sunday, March 27, 2005, at 02:33 , Carsten Becker wrote:
[snip]
> Sorry to interrupt, but my dictionary has "ventriloquist"
> for "Bauchredner" ('stomach talker'). Is this how
> ventriloquists can produce sounds without opening their
> mouths?
I think not. 'Bauchredner' is surely just a calque of the Classical Latin
_uentriloquus_ (belly-talker), from which English 'ventriloquist' is
derived. Apparently, it was thought by those ancients that ventiloquists
produced their sounds, not by using the mouth, as normal mortals do, by
from the belly or stomach.

The English 'ventricle' is from Latin _uentriculus_ "little belly", and
has come to mean 'a small cavity [in the body]' - thus it might be a
cavity in the brain, a contractile chamber of the heart, or in the false
folds above the voice box (and possibly some other places, for all I know)
   - in Shakespear it is used to mean 'womb'.

Ray
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]