Glottal stops

[A. Katz]

Yuri,

It's not that the brain commands us to use glottal stops or not. There is 
a historical process whereby languages change their phonetic inventories. 
It has nothing to do with the genetic configuration of different brains.

    --Aya


On Sun, 31 Oct 2010, Yuri Tambovtsev wrote:

> Dear John, if you mean glottal stops as clicks, then indeed they are used in Caucasian languages. However, if you count their frequency of occurrence, then you see that they are quite seldom among other speech sounds in the sound speech chain. I should guess it is because they require too much effort of the articulartory apparatus. I have studied them in 256 world languages. They are not common to the Human Language. It is interesting enough, but what is more interesting it is why some languages use some sort of speech sounds more frequently than the others. I wonder who is working in this direction of research? Why does brain commands to use this sound more frequently in one language and the same Human Brain (or different?) commands to use the same sound in some other language less frequently? Linguistics assumes that Human Brains are the same all over the world. It is also assumed that the Human speech production apparatus is also the same. Nevertheless, the sound pictures of different languages are different. I have checked it on 256 world languages. Is it not an enigma? Be well, Yuri Tambovtsev, yutamb at mail.ru
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