Read Online Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man by Mark Changizi - Free Book Online Page B

of these million hits is appreciably more energetic than the others. If this were the case, then the start of the slide would acquire a crispness normally found in hits. But this hit would be just the first of a long sequence of hits, and would thus be part of the slide itself. Such a hit-slide would, if it existed, be neither a hit nor a slide.
    And they do exist, for several converging reasons. First, slides have a tendency to be initiated by hits. Try sliding this book on a desk. The first time you tried, you may have bumped your hand into the book in the process of attempting to make it slide. That is, you may have hit the book prior to the slide (see Figure 5). It requires careful attention to gently touch the book without hitting it first. Now grab hold of the book and try to slide it without an initial hit. Even in this case there can often be an initial hitlike event. This is because in order to slide an object, you must overcome static friction, the “sticky” friction preventing the initiation of a slide. This initial push is hitlike because the sudden overcoming of static friction creates a sudden burst of many frequencies, as in Figure 4a. Slides, then, often begin with a hit. Second, hits often have slides following them. If you hit a wall with a straight jab, you will get a lone hit, with no follow-up slide. But if you move your arm horizontally next to the wall as you are hitting it—in order to give it a more glancing blow—there will sometimes be a small skid, or slide, after the initial hit.

     
    Figure 5 . A hit-slide is a fourth fundamental constituent of physical events. It sounds like a kind of phoneme in language called the affricate, which is like a plosive followed by a fricative.
     
    Although a hit followed by a slide is a natural regularity in the world, a slide followed by a hit is not a natural physical regularity. First, it is common to have a hit not preceded by a slide. To see this, just hit something. Odds are you managed to make a hit without a slide first. Second, when there is a slide, there is no physical regularity tending to lead to a hit. Slides followed by hits are possible, of course—in shuffleboard, for example (and note the fricatives in “shuffle”)—but they really are two separate events in succession. A hit-slide, on the other hand, can effectively be a single event, as we discussed a moment ago.
    If language sounds like nature, then we should expect linguistic hit-slide sounds to be more common than slide-hit sounds. Later in this chapter—in the section titled “Nature’s Words”—I will provide evidence that this is true of the way phonemes combine into words across human languages. But in this section I want to focus on the single-phoneme level. The question is, since hit-slides are a special kind of fundamental event atom, but slide-hits are not, do we find that languages have phonemes that sound like hit-slides, but not phonemes that sound like slide-hits?
    Languages, like nature, are asymmetrical in this way. There is a kind of phoneme found in many languages called an affricate , which is a fricative that begins as a plosive. One example in English is “ch,” which is a single phoneme that possesses a “t” sound followed by a “sh” sound. In addition to words like “chair,” it also occurs in words like “congratulate” (spoken like “congratchulate”), and often in words like “trash” (spoken like “chrash”). Another example is “j,” which begins with “d” sound followed by a voiced version of the “sh” phoneme. Although we can describe “ch” as a “sh” initiated by a “t,” it is not the same sound that occurs when we say “t” and quickly follow it up with “sh.” The “ch” phoneme has the “t” and “sh” sounds bound up so closely to one another that they sound like a single atomic event. The “tsh” sound in “hotshot,” on the other hand, will typically sound different from “ch”; that is, we do