Where Sounds Come from

(and What They End Up as)

Some additional remarks on phonetics I

 1. Evolution

• Human Language (HL) – Since when?

• The end point of its evolution must lie before the trek “Out of Afri-
ca” because the capacity
is the same in all hu-
mans.
• We speak of anatomically
modern humans (AMH)
(non-Neanderthals, non-Denisovans); first exemplar at 196,000 BC.
• Neanderthals & Denisovans had a vo-
cal tract different from humans.

• They split from “us” around 500.000

year ago, and the sounds they were
able to produce were both similar and different from ours.

• HL is not identical with speech, which is part of HL, but neither a

necessary (Sign Language!) nor a sufficient (parrots!) one.

• The first AMH had a vocal tract basically identical to ours; language
as we know it must have arisen between then and 100,000 BC.
• We will come back to the other aspects of HL in addition to the ca-
pacity to speak like modern humans. Cru-
cial for the latter capacity, however, were
the following two points:

o The lowering of the hyoid bone, the

“anchor” of the tongue.

o The lowering of the larynx.

• The new configuration (present in proto-form in Neanderthals &

Denisovans) resulting from this creates something entirely novel:
 o The vocal tract is now effectively divided into a tube from the
larynx to the pharynx and another one from there to the lips.

o This is the basis for what we call vowels.

• Vowels can acoustically

be defined by a basic fre-
quency F1 and an addi-
tional frequency F2, at
which point I’ll simply
hand over to this excellent video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWel5j-F8lE.
In sum, what we have here is the bridge between the vocal gymnas-
tics we employ when we speak and the acoustic results that these
gymnastics produce. Neither the activity nor the specific sound
waves produced would be possible without our anatomy, just as a
violin cannot produce what a flute can. There is also a third aspect:
The listener perceiving this as different from undifferentiated noise.