Free Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man by Mark Changizi Page A

Phonological Segment Inventory Database (32 percent), whereas “z” (the voiced version of “s”) is found in 77 of 197 languages (39 percent) and 36 of 317 languages (11 percent), respectively. Similarly, “f” is found in 106 of 197 languages (54 percent) and in 135 of 317 languages (43 percent), whereas “v” is found in 61 of 197 languages (31 percent) and in 67 of 317 languages (21 percent), respectively. These data suggest that unvoiced slides are about twice as likely as voiced slides to be found in a language. (And notice how, in English at least, one finds voiced-fricative words with meanings related to slides that sing: rev, vroom, buzz, zoom, and fizz. One also finds unvoiced-fricative words with meanings related to unsung slides: slash, slice, and hiss.)
    Voiced and unvoiced fricatives are found in languages because they’re found in the physics of slides. Hits can also be voiced or unvoiced, but for completely different physical reasons than slides. Zip up your pants and let’s get to this.
    Two-Hit Wonder
    Each day, more than a billion people wake to the sound of a ringing alarm, reach over, and hit the alarm clock, thereby terminating the ring and giving themselves another five minutes of sleep. In these billion cases a hit stops a ring, rather than starting one as we talked about earlier. Of course, the hit on the clock does cause periodic vibrations of the clock (and of the sleeper’s hand), but the sound of these vibrations is likely drowned out by the sound of the alarm still ringing in one’s ears.
    Although hitting the snooze button of an alarm clock is not a genuine case of a hit stopping a ring, there are suchgenuine cases. Imagine a large bell that has been struck and is ringing. If you now suddenly place your hand on it, and keep it there, the ringing will suddenly stop. Such a sudden hand placement amounts to a hit—a hit that sticks its landing. And it is, in this case, by virtue of dampening, a hit that leads to the termination of a ring. Some dampening will occur even if your hand doesn’t stick the landing, so long as you hit the bell much less energetically than it is currently ringing; the temporary contact will “smother” some of the periodic vibrations occurring in the bell.
    Although in such cases it can sound as if the bell’s ringing has terminated, in reality one can leave the bell with a residual ring. A hit on a quiet bell would sound like an explosive hit, because in contrast to the bell’s stillness, the hit is a sudden discontinuous rise in the ringing magnitude. But that same hit on an already very loudly ringing bell causes a sudden discontinuous drop in the ringing magnitude. In contrast to the loud ringing before the hit, the hit will sound like the sudden ceasing of a ring, even if there is residual ringing.
    Hits, therefore, have two voices, not just the one we discussed earlier in the section called “Nature’s Phonemes.” Hits not only can create the sudden appearance of a wide range of frequencies, but can also sometimes quite suddenly dampen out a wide range of frequencies. These two sounds of hits are, in a sense, opposites, and yet both are possible consequences of one and the same kind of hit. This second voice is rarer, however, because it depends on there already being a higher-energy ring before the hit, which is uncommon because rings typically decay quickly. That is, the explosive voice of hits is more common than the dampening voice, because most objects are not already ringing when they are hit.
    If languages have harnessed our brain’s competencies for natural events, then we might expect languages to utilize both of these hit sounds. And indeed they do. The plosives we discussed earlier consisted of an explosive release of air, after having momentarily stopped the airflow and let pressure build. But plosives also occur when the air is momentarily stopped, but not released. This happens most commonly when plosives are at the ends of words.