This book is being used as an introductory textbook on phonetics.
The sound files that go with it are available on Wiley's website.
Chapter 1: Sounds and Languages
Mammels make sounds. How this turned into human language, we don't know. But we can examine how speech sounds change with time anyway, even if we don't know the origin of language.
How many languages, how many speakers
There are about 7,000 languages in the world today, though maybe half of these will 'go extinct' in the next hundred years.
About 44% of the world's population speaks one of the 10 major languages (Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese and German - French comes in around 18th, or 11th if you include non-native speakers).
About 51% of languages are spoken by less than 10,000 people - a small town's population.
About 25% are spoken by less than 1,000 - a village.
Choosing which language to speak is almost entirely divorced from what the language is like: I am writing in English rather than French partly for historical reasons (this is my native tongue, because this part of the world is English speaking, because the English rule it, because...), and partly because English is currently accessible to more people. (Which, yes, is also for historical reasons. All effects are caused by things in the past, unless physics fundamentally works differently than we think.)
I can avoid the difficult choice between my culture on the one hand, and on the other, having available to me technology, research, big-budget films and the like. For me, English is what my great-grandparents spoke, what my culture's literature is written in - and also what is most useful for getting the latest software upgrade.
For many people, it's not that straightforward - and Ladefoged points out that it's rather patronising to 'save' someone else's language if what they want to do is speak English, to get a job in the aerospace industry.
So for linguists, now is a good time to get as much data as possible, before many languages disappear.
Principle constraints on language sounds
- Articulatory ease (can you pronounce it?)
- Auditory distinctiveness (can you hear the difference?)
- Memory (Are the words too long to remember? More sounds means shorter words.)
- Gestural economy (similar 'gestures' of the tongue and lips are easier to reproduce)
Common features of languages
- Vowels
- Consonants
- All words use outgoing lung air (some also use ingoing air in parts of a word)
- Variation in pitch
Speech conveys non-linguistic information
There is non-linguistic information that is present in speech, that is not part of the deliberate communication: it is not language. The following are usually conveyed by speech, where they wouldn't be in writing:
- Accent (where the speaker lives, which social group they belong to)
- Attitude to life / the subject / the listener
- Gender
- Identity (who it is)
Sound waves
- Sound is a rapid variation in air pressure.
- The pitch of a sound depends on the rate of repetition of the sound wave, its frequency. The loudness of a sound depends on the size of the variations in air pressure.
- Vowel 'quality' is the difference between a as in 'far' and i as in 'see'. (See my IPA post for an explanation of the linguists' writing system.) This comes from "differences in the shape of the sound wave", and is examined more in Chapter 4.