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Carpal Tunnel
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They start out closed. What I said, it's the default position. You don't have to go anywhere to get there. The /oo/ sound is chosen for whatever reason but the /b/ is just default. If we were sitting around with our vela closed we'd maybe say "Gooooooooo!" when voicing disapproval, but we'd have to have a very different throat structure to permit breathing in this condition.
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What I said is that the default position for the human vocal tract is mouth open and no closures anywhere, either at the lips of the velum. You can close your velum and still breathe through your nose.
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Good article. I still think the "ease" of certain sounds has more to do with the visibility of articulation. Moving back in the tract from lips to velum.
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the default position for the human vocal tract is mouth open and no closures anywhere
Too often the default position is a fist delivered to an open mouth. It doesn't often provide closure either.
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Too often the default position is a fist delivered to an open mouth.
I used to wonder what a truly alien language would be like. Imagining non-vocal tract sounds, or dual ones. I've always been impressed that some folks can use their fingers to shrillify their whistles. Sign language is very interesting from a linguistics POV. Some think it's just a code for an underlying language. Such opinions are frowned upon by signers.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Without being able to provide any references, I know that the grammar of ASL is very different from the grammar of English.
Edit: googling 'asl grammar' provides many sites that look, at first glance, to be quite informative.
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ASL is not signed English. I've looked at it and spoken with both hearing and deaf signer before about it. There is something, taught in schools, called Exact Signed English, which is usually distained by ASLers. One example: you can mention folks, by signing their name, etc., and place them in 3D space before you (the signer). You can then refer (by pointing to the space) to that person. It's like having a bunch of extra third person pronouns. He-sub-1, thru she-sub-2. ASL also has a full and functional morphology which is quite different from English.
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Carpal Tunnel
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One of the googled sites had an interesting comment: until the late twentieth century many signers of ASL did not know that their language even had a grammar, yet it does, as nuncle says, possess a rich grammar all its own.
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Not everybody realizes that all languages (and dialects) have grammars, i.e., languages are rules-based. When somebody says that language X doesn't have a grammar, they usually mean that it doesn't have inflections or has a grammar that is different from their language's grammar.
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