Hi, in the previous video, we discussed the different ways in which languages can
produce different consonants, and
the ways in which they can distinguish between them.
We have seen our three dimensions which are relevant here.
The first is place of articulation, where in the mouth do I produce the sound?
The second is manner of articulation,
how is the air stream modified when I produce the sound?
And the third is voicing, what do I do with my vocal cords?
I'm going to discuss
these issues a little bit more now with my students, Inge and Marten.
>> Yes I'd like to ask the first question because I was wondering
are there consonants that occur in all languages?
>> Yeah, right, that, that's a very interesting question.
It's actually a question which has inspired linguists forever or
at least since the 19th century and the answer seems to be
that there at least two good candidates for such consonants.
This is the M sound, and the T sound.
They, linguists don't necessarily agree on them, there are some linguists who say
that maybe, one of, or two of these sounds don't occur in all languages.
But I think, it's fair to say that they do.
>> But why would it be M and T only?
>> Well, it's probably M and T because they are simple.
For instance, they are easy to make.
It's very easy to make a T.
I use the tip of my tongue.
The tip of my tongue is very flexible and
I put it basically at its natural place just behind the teeth.
T, that's a very simple sound to make and
it's a wonderful consonant, and M is also very simple to make.
I just close my lips.
Furthermore, it's very easy to see.
It's very easy to, to see that somebody is making an M sound.
As a matter of fact, it's sometimes claimed that all languages, or
many languages at least have the same word for
mother, it's mama, something like that.
And the reason for that might be that it's so easy to make for a child, so the child is
just lying there in its cradle and saying [mamamama] not meaning anything at all,
it's just the mother who observes this and thinks, okay, he must be talking about me.
>> Okay, so M and T are the easiest sounds, or the easiest consonants?
And if you look at all languages in the world are they certain?
What, what constants are there?
What set?
>> Yeah, there so the, it's a,
it's a set of very vast size probably because even this T sound might sound
quite slightly different in one language from the next.
But apart from that I, I think if we look at the phonetic alphabet we
see a few hundred different symbols for consonants.
So it's quite many.
>> And is there one language that has most consonants of all?
>> Well, yeah, I'm, I'm not sure, depends a little bit on how you count.
But if you want to find one such language, for some reason,
you have to go to Southern Africa.
So there's several languages spoken there which seem to have many, many different
consonant sounds, something between 100 and 150 different sounds.
>> Okay, I was, I was also wondering then
I know that we talk mostly about consonants, but what about vowels?
Are, are there also that many vowels?
>> Well, yeah, that's another interesting question.
I think the answer is no.
So if we look again at the set of symbols which are used in the phonetic alphabet,
it's definitely smaller.
So that's one side of the answer.
Also, within a language, if you have many different you
use more consonants than vowels within one
>> Okay. >> in the same language.
>> And is there a reason for that?
I mean, if there are just fewer vowels in general, doesn't mean that a language
always also needs to have fewer vowels than consonants.
>> Yeah, that's true,
but I think there are two sides to this, to the answer to this.
So on the one hand vowels, it's more difficult to distinguish
between vowels, because the difference between vowels and consonants again is, in
order to produce consonants, you need some obstruction somewhere in your mouth.
In order to produce a vowel, there's no obstruction,
you just transform the sound when it's going out in some way.
And there's just many more different ways of making an obstruction in your mouth
than transforming a sound like that.
That seems to be an important part of the answer.
Now you can also ask, how then come,
that within a language there are still more consonants than vowels?
So some languages have many different vowels.
So we are, all three of us are speakers of Dutch, and
Dutch actually has quite a lot of different vowels.
It has like 13 different vowels.
Well, there are languages which have only maybe ten consonants,
so why are there no languages with 13 vowels and ten consonants?
The answer to that, I think is also interesting, and that it seems to be that
consonants have a slightly different function in language than vowels.
So, consonants seem to reveal more of word meaning.
We use consonants mostly to reveal word meaning.
In Semitic languages, like Hebrew and
Arabic, people write only the consonants and not the vowels.
They apparently don't need them to still understand it.
Maybe you even remember from, on the Internet, there
are these messages where they just took out all the vowels from an English text.
>> Mm-hm. >> Mm-hm.
>> And you can still understand those messages.
So, that's what we use consonants for,
mostly to, if you see the consonants you already know what the word is.
So, you don't really need the vowels for that.
The vowels, we use more for grammar,
for expressing grammatical structure.
If I, if I say a sentence and if towards the end of the sentence my voice goes
really low, in English, what do, where do I do that?
I do that on the vowels.
So that's what I use the vowels for more.
So they seem to have slightly different functions.
And there's many different words with many different meanings in human language
but there's not so
many different kinds of grammatical constructions in the same languages.
>> Okay, and then finally I had a question which is similar to the one
earlier about consonants,
is that, are there also vowels that can be found in all languages in the world?
>> The, well, probably yes.
Again, it depends a little bit and people are debating about this.
People just like to debate about these kinds of things.
But I think that it's fair to say that 99% of all
languages have at least three different vowels and
those three different vowels then are typically A, I and U.
Again they are sounds which are relatively easy to make.
They probably are the three vowel sounds which are easiest to produce and
are also maximally different.
They're very easy to distinguish from each other.
In this video, we have seen that there are certain consonants and
also certain vowels which seem to occur in all languages.
But that beyond that there's a vast variation.
We've also seen that there seem to be more consonants than vowels, typically,
in a language and you've seen that there might be various reasons for that.
In the next video we're going to look more into language,
into how all these differences between consonants are actually used in language,
in speech errors, in the way in which we learn languages,
and in the way in which languages are structured.