Is there a study that correlates environmental areas / climates / etc. with phonetic features? For example, are uvular consonants or fricatives, say, more prevalent in colder areas? Or do larger phoneme inventories occur in more environmentally diverse areas? Alternatively, is there a study that shows that there is no correspondence between phoneme inventory / phonotactics and geographical features?
frag might know or some of the other linguistics people ? I can tell you this : In Africa it is said that they use pitch to distinguish different wordage or ideas or to convey messages . So not only different sounds but different pitches too . Whistles and clicks too. I think that is funny cause the native peoples in the Americas talk about using clicks and whistles and such to communicate . With nature too . Frag knows some about this too . The clicks of first humans I have seen him write about
Probably for the same reason drums were invented before the didgeridoo. Chinese tones are probably the best example for this. --- angslan - Great question but sorry I have no idea.
In colder latitudes languages tend toward more compactness, because exhaling dissipates precious body heat. They also use fewer vowels because producing a vowel expels more air. Compare the Scandinavian languages to the Polynesian languages. Other factors affect phonetics. The Hawaiians did much of their communicating on the open sea, yelling at each other from one raft to another. As a result the phonetics of their language are greatly simplified to make it easier to identify the sounds under such dismal acoustic conditions. It has only seven consonants: HKLMNP and the glottal stop. Of course this results in some very long words with a lot of vowels, but since they live in the tropics they don't have to worry about body heat. Look at how their language has evolved: Samoan salofa --> Hawaiian aloha, Fijian tabu --> Hawaiian kapu. We call those tonal languages and they occur all over the planet in unrelated language families, including Chinese, Vietnamese and some of the Native American groups. There is not even consistency within families: Hausa is tonal, Arabic is not. There appears to be no correlation with geography. It's been hypothesized that the first primitive languages evolved from the sounds hunters made to communicate with each other while hiding from their prey. However, this hypothesis has not achieved general acceptance for a variety of reasons. I know a little more about this than when I first wrote about it, thanks to the explosion of the internet. Today I would have to say that there's no convincing proof that these sounds represent souvenirs of our first attempts at speech.
Cheers Fraggle, that bit about Hawaiian, cold air, vowels and temperature, and about the acoustic environment was really the sort of thing that I was looking for! Is there a reliable source to investigate this further?
Certainly. But linguistics is a pretty arcane science so very little of the research trickles out into the popular press due to lack of excitement. Much of what I know has been gathered, one fact at a time, over half a century, from articles and from comments by people who speak foreign languages and/or have an academic interest of their own. I don't have access to the university papers that might shed more light on these things--or perhaps just confuse us even more. And I don't have a library of fifty-dollar books by people like Chomsky. Now we have Wikipedia and the articles on languages and various aspects of linguistics have a wealth of detail. Unfortunately since it's one of the softest of the "soft sciences," there is considerable disagreement over many details that go beyond the usual Euro-American axis of Latin, Greek, Hebrew and English. Unlike the articles on inertia, Mozart or Venice, it's not easy to make sure that something we "learn" is indeed a near-universal consensus of the professional scholars.
Norm . I love this bar . I read one of his books . He is a radical . Is that the same guy Frag . Norm Chomsky
I don't know whom you're referring to. Chomsky's first name is NOAM. It appears to be a Hebrew name, but then so are Daniel and Esther.
I actually do have access to a library of valuable books on linguistics via my university, but still I am stumped as to a detailed study into this particular part of the field, as I can find no books that cover this particular aspect of the topic. I will keep searching and, if you are interested, post any good books that I can find.
