Two‑Hit Wonder

Each day, more than a billion people wake to the sound of a ringing alarm, reach over, and hit the alarm clock, thereby terminating the ring and giving themselves another five minutes of sleep. In these billion cases a hit stops a ring, rather than starting one as we talked about earlier. Of course, the hit on the clock does cause periodic vibrations of the clock (and of the sleeper’s hand), but the sound of these vibrations is likely drowned out by the sound of the alarm still ringing in one’s ears.

Although hitting the snooze button of an alarm clock is not a genuine case of a hit stopping a ring, there are such genuine cases. Imagine a large bell that has been struck and is ringing. If you now suddenly place your hand on it, and keep it there, the ringing will suddenly stop. Such a sudden hand placement amounts to a hit–a hit that sticks its landing. And it is, in this case, by virtue of dampening, a hit that leads to the termination of a ring. Some dampening will occur even if your hand doesn’t stick the landing, so long as you hit the bell much less energetically than it is currently ringing; the temporary contact will “smother” some of the periodic vibrations occurring in the bell.

Although in such cases it can sound as if the bell’s ringing has terminated, in reality one can leave the bell with a residual ring. A hit on a quiet bell would sound like an explosive hit, because in contrast to the bell’s stillness, the hit is a sudden discontinuous rise in the ringing magnitude. But that same hit on an already very loudly ringing bell causes a sudden discontinuous drop in the ringing magnitude. In contrast to the loud ringing before the hit, the hit will sound like the sudden ceasing of a ring, even if there is residual ringing.

Hits, therefore, have two voices, not just the one we discussed earlier in the section called “Nature’s Phonemes.” Hits not only can create the sudden appearance of a wide range of frequencies, but can also sometimes quite suddenly dampen out a wide range of frequencies. These two sounds of hits are, in a sense, opposites, and yet both are possible consequences of one and the same kind of hit. This second voice is rarer, however, because it depends on there already being a higher‑energy ring before the hit, which is uncommon because rings typically decay quickly. That is, the explosive voice of hits is more common than the dampening voice, because most objects are not already ringing when they are hit.

If languages have harnessed our brain’s competencies for natural events, then we might expect languages to utilize both of these hit sounds. And indeed they do. The plosives we discussed earlier consisted of an explosive release of air, after having momentarily stopped the airflow and let pressure build. But plosives also occur when the air is momentarily stopped, but not released. This happens most commonly when plosives are at the ends of words. For example, when you utter “what” in the sentence “What book is this?” your mouth goes to the anatomical position for a “t,” but does not ever release the “t” (unless, say, you are angry and slowly enunciating the sentence). Such instances of plosive stop sounds are quite common in language, but less so than released plosive sounds–there are many languages that do not allow unreleased plosives, but none that do not allow released plosives. John Locke tabulated from the Stanford Handbook that, in 32 languages that possessed word‑position information, no plosives were off limits at word starts (where they would be released), but 79 plosives were impermissible at word‑final position (where they are typically unreleased). Also, among the words we collected from 18 languages, 16,130 of a total of 18,927 plosives, or 85 percent, were directly followed by a sonorant (and thus were released), and therefore only 2,797 plosives, or 15 percent, were unreleased. And even in languages (like English) that allow both kinds of plosive sounds, plosives are more commonly employed in their explosive form, something we will talk about in a later section (“In the Beginning”). This fits with the pattern in nature, where explosive hits are more common than dampening hits.

Not only does language have both hit sounds as part of its repertoire, but, like nature, it treats the unreleased “t” sound and the released “t” sound as the same phoneme. This is remarkable, because they are temporal opposites: one is like a little explosion, the other like a little anti explosion. One can imagine, as a thought experiment, that people could have ended up with a language that treats these two distinct “t” sounds as two distinct phonemes, rather than two instances of a single one. In light of the auditory structure of nature, however, it is not at all mysterious: any given hit can have two very different sounds, and language carves at nature’s joints.

In light of the two sounds hits make, there is a simple kind of sound we can make, but that language never includes as a phoneme: “beep,” like an electronic beep or like Road Runner. A beep consists of a sudden start of a tone, and then a sudden stop. Beeps might, at first glance, seem to be a candidate for a fundamental constituent of communicating by sound: what could be simpler, or more “raw,” than a beep? However, although our first intuitions tell us that beeps are simple, in physics they are not. In the real world of physical events among objects, beeps can only happen when there is a hit (the abrupt start to the beep), a ring that follows (the beep’s tone), and a second hit, this one a dampening one (the abrupt beep ending). A “simple” beep can’t happen in everyday physics unless three simple constituent events occur. And we find that in languages as well: there are no beeplike phonemes. To make a beep sound in language requires one to first say a plosive of the released kind, then a (nonwiggly) sonorant, and finally an unreleased plosive . . . just like when we say the word “beep.”