Words truly beginning with a sonorant sound begin not with a vowel, but with a sonorant consonant like w, y, l, r, and m. When one says, “what,” “yup,” “lid,” “rip,” and “map,” the start of the word is nonsudden (or less sudden than a plosive), ramping up more gradually to the sonorant sound instead. And notice that words such as these—with a sonorant at the start and a plosive at the end—do sound like backwards sounds. Try saying the following meaningless sentence: “Rout yab rallod.” Now say this one: “Cort kabe pullod.” Although they are similar, the first of these meaningless sentences sounds more like events in reverse. This is because it has words of the ring-hit form, the signature sound of a world in reverse. The second sentence, while equally meaningless, sounds like typical speech (and event) sounds, because it starts with plosives.
Language’s most universal structure above the level of phonemes—the syllable—has its foundation, then, in physics. The interaction-rings of physical events got instilled into our auditory systems over hundreds of millions of years of vertebrate and mammalian evolution, and culture shaped language to sound like physics in order to best harness our hardware.
Before we move next to the shape of words, there is another place where syllables play a central role: in rhyme. Two words rhyme if their final syllables have the same sonorant sound, and the same plosive or fricative following the sonorant—for example, “snug as a bug in a rug.” The sonorant sound is the more important of the two: “bug” rhymes better with “bud” than with “bag.” Our ecological understanding of syllables may help to make sense of the perceptual salience of rhyme. When two events share the same ring sound, it means the same kind of object is involved in both events. For example, “tell and “sell” rhyme, and in terms of nature’s physics, they sound like two distinct events involving the same object. “Tell” might suggest that some object has been hit, and “sell” that that same object is now sliding. The “ell” in each case signals that it is the same object undergoing different events. This is just the kind of gestalt perceptual mechanism humans are well known to possess: we attempt to group stimuli into meaningful units. In vision this can lead to contours at distant corners of an image being perceptually treated as parts of one and the same object, and in audition it can lead to sounds separated by time as nevertheless grouped into the same object. That’s what happens in rhyme: the second word of a rhyming pair may occur several lines later, but our brain hears the similar ringing sound and groups it with the earlier one, because it would be likely in nature that such sounds were made by one and the same object.
In the Beginning
The Big Bang is the ultimate event, and even it illustrates the typical physical structure of events: it started with a sudden explosion, one whose ringing is still “heard” today as the background microwave radiation permeating all space. Slides didn’t make an appearance in our universe until long after the Bang. As we will see in this section, hits, slides, and rings tend to inhabit different parts of events, with hits and rings—bangs—favoring the early parts.
To get a feeling for where hits, slides, and rings occur in events, let’s take a look at a simpler event than the one that created the universe. Take a pen and throw it onto a table. What happened? The first thing that happened is that the pen hit the table; the audible event starts with a hit. Might this be a general feature of solid-object physical events? There are fundamental reasons for thinking so, something we discussed in the earlier section, “Nature’s Other Phoneme.” We concluded that whereas hits can occur without a preceding slide, slides do not tend to occur without a preceding hit. Another reason why slides do not tend to start events is that friction turns kinetic energy into heat, decreasing the chance for the slide to initiate much of an event at all. So, while hits can happen at any part of an event, they are most likely to occur at the start. And while slides can also happen anywhere in an event, they are less likely to occur near the start. Note that I am not concluding that slides are more common than hits at the nonstarts. Hits are more common than slides, no matter where one looks within solid-object physical events. I’m only saying that hits are more common at event starts than they are at nonstarts, and that slides are less common at event starts than they are at nonstarts.
Is this regularity about the kinds of interaction at the starts and nonstarts of events found in spoken language? Yes. Words of the form bas are more common than words of the form sab (where, as earlier, b stands for a plosive, s for a fricative, and a for any number of consecutive sonorants). Figure 9 shows the probability that a non-sonorant is a plosive (rather than a fricative) as one moves from the start of a word to non-sonorants further into the word. The data come from 18 widely varying languages, listed in the legend. One can see that the probability that the non-sonorant phoneme is a plosive begins high at the start of words, after which it falls, matching the pattern expected from physics. And, as anticipated, one can also see that the probability of plosives after the start is still higher than the probability of a fricative.
Figure 9. This shows how plosives are more probable at the start of words, and fall in probability after the start. The y-axis shows the plosive-to-fricative ratio, and the x-axis the ith non-sonorant in a word. The dotted line is for words with two non-sonorants, and the solid line for words with three non-sonorants. The main points are (i) that plosives are always more probable than fricatives, as seen here because the plosive-to-fricative probability ratios are always greater than 1, and (ii) that the ratio falls after the start of the word, meaning fricatives are disproportionately rare at word starts. These data come from common words (typically about a thousand) from each of the following languages: Japanese, Zulu, Malagasy, Somali, Fijian, Lango, Inuktitut, Bosnian, Spanish, Turkish, English, German, Bengali, Yucatec, Wolof, Tamil, Taino, Haya.
We just concluded that hits are disproportionately common at the starts of events in nature, and that this feature is also found in language. But we ignored rings. Where in events do rings tend to reside? In the previous section (“Nature’s Syllables”) we discussed the fact that rings do not start events, a phenomenon also reflected in language. How about after the start of a word? There would appear to be a simple answer: rings always occur after physical interactions, and so rings should appear at all spots within events, following each hit or slide.
But as we will see next, reality is more subtle.
The First Was a Doozy
While it is true that all physical interactions cause ringing, the ringing need not be audible, a point that already came up in the section called “Two-Hit Wonder.” In this light, we need to ask, where in events are the rings most audible? Consider the generic pen-on-table event again. The beginning of that event—the audible portion of it, starting when the pen hit the table—is where the greatest energy tends to be, and the ring sound after the first hit will therefore tend to be the loudest. If the pen bounces and hits the table again, the ring sound will be significantly lower in magnitude, and it will be lower still for any further bounces. Because energy tends to get dissipated during the course of an event, rings have a tendency to be louder earlier in the event than later in the event. This is a tendency, but it is not always the case. If energy gets added during the event, ring magnitude can increase. For example, if your pen bounces a couple of times on the table, but then bounces off the table onto the floor, then the floor hit may well be louder than the first table hit (gravity is the energy-adding culprit). Nevertheless, in the generic or typical case, energy will dissipate over the course of a physical event, and thus ringing magnitude will tend to be reduced as an event unfolds. Therefore, the audibility of a ring tends to be higher near the start of an event; or, correspondingly, the probability is higher later in an event that a ring might not be audible.