対人能力ゼロのナンパ６
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The Study of Sounds
The sounds produced by human vocal organs can be studied in many different ways.
The study of sounds is calld phonetics.
Phonetics is mainly concerned with describing the speech sounds that occur in the languages of the world.
Specifically, we want to know what people are doing when they are talking and when they are listening to speech.
Some phoneticians are interested in studying the physical and acoustic aspects of speech sounds, while others are interested in studying the patterns and functions of sounds that occur in a language.
In the latter type of study, it is important to realize that speech sounds can be perceived and represented as a sequence of discrete units, even though they are physically continuous.
Native speakers of any language can intuitively extract the linguistically significant units.
For example, when native speakers of English are asked how many sounds there are in the word pit they will most probably ansewer three.
The concept oe decreteness is a basic assumption in the study of speech sounds.
These discrete units of sounds are not arbitrarily combined; the sequence of such units is under certain restrictions.
For example, there is no English word which begins with ten consonants.
Furthermore, the consonants which can appear in the iinitial clusters of English are restricted.
Thus for a three-consonant cluster beginning with /s/, the second consonant can only be one of /p,t,k/.
Such restrictions are found in many languages,
and one of the purposes of the study of speech sounds is to examine the kind of restrictions peculiar to an individual language.
Therefore, there are several levels in the study of speech sounds: on the one concrete level we try to describe what speech sounds exist,
and on the other abstract level we try to examine what regularities govern the realizations of sounds in a langiage.
Instead of opposing magic and science, it would be better to compare them as two
parallel modes of acquiring knowledge.
Their theoretical and practical results differ in value(as science is certainly more successful
than magic point of view, although magic foreshadows science in that it sometimes also works).
But both science and magic require the same sort of mental operations, which differ not so much
in kind as in the different types of phenomena to which they are applied.
These relations are a consequence of objective conditions in which magic and scientific knowledge appeared.
The history of the latter is short enough for us to know a good deal about it. But the fact that modern science
dates back only a few centuries raises a problem which ethnologists have not sufficiently pondered.
The Neolithic Paradox would be a suitable name for it.
It was in neolithic times that humanity mastered the great arts of civilizations,
which are pottery, weaving, agriculture, and the domestication of animals.
No one today would think of attributing these enormous advances to the fortuitous
accumulation of a perception of certain natural phenomena.
The sounds produced by human vocal organs can be studied in many different ways.
The study of sounds is calld phonetics.
Phonetics is mainly concerned with describing the speech sounds that occur in the languages of the world.
Specifically, we want to know what people are doing when they are talking and when they are listening to speech.
Some phoneticians are interested in studying the physical and acoustic aspects of speech sounds, while others are interested in studying the patterns and functions of sounds that occur in a language.
In the latter type of study, it is important to realize that speech sounds can be perceived and represented as a sequence of discrete units, even though they are physically continuous.
Native speakers of any language can intuitively extract the linguistically significant units.
For example, when native speakers of English are asked how many sounds there are in the word pit they will most probably ansewer three.
The concept oe decreteness is a basic assumption in the study of speech sounds.
These discrete units of sounds are not arbitrarily combined; the sequence of such units is under certain restrictions.
For example, there is no English word which begins with ten consonants.
Furthermore, the consonants which can appear in the iinitial clusters of English are restricted.
Thus for a three-consonant cluster beginning with /s/, the second consonant can only be one of /p,t,k/.
Such restrictions are found in many languages,
and one of the purposes of the study of speech sounds is to examine the kind of restrictions peculiar to an individual language.
Therefore, there are several levels in the study of speech sounds: on the one concrete level we try to describe what speech sounds exist,
and on the other abstract level we try to examine what regularities govern the realizations of sounds in a langiage.
Instead of opposing magic and science, it would be better to compare them as two
parallel modes of acquiring knowledge.
Their theoretical and practical results differ in value(as science is certainly more successful
than magic point of view, although magic foreshadows science in that it sometimes also works).
But both science and magic require the same sort of mental operations, which differ not so much
in kind as in the different types of phenomena to which they are applied.
These relations are a consequence of objective conditions in which magic and scientific knowledge appeared.
The history of the latter is short enough for us to know a good deal about it. But the fact that modern science
dates back only a few centuries raises a problem which ethnologists have not sufficiently pondered.
The Neolithic Paradox would be a suitable name for it.
It was in neolithic times that humanity mastered the great arts of civilizations,
which are pottery, weaving, agriculture, and the domestication of animals.
No one today would think of attributing these enormous advances to the fortuitous
accumulation of a perception of certain natural phenomena.
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