Linguistic

Speculative Anatomy Meets Articulatory Phonetics Human’s anatomy enables them to articulate a lot of sounds. However, there is a kind of alternate creatures named stumans that evolve completely different ways to eat and breath. Their oral cavities and breathing organs are not connected together. And therefore stumans evolve separate path to inhale air and eat food. Stumans’ anatomy nevertheless may influence their ability to produce speech sounds. Without the connection between the oral cavity and nasal cavity, the air cannot flow freely and thus could not make some sounds. In contrast to human’s anatomy, stumans can only articulate some consonants like clicks and nasal consonant and nasal vowels. On account of different anatomy features of human and stumans, while human can make all of the consonants, stumans can only articulate a part of the consonants. For human, consonants are produced with some restriction and closure in the vocal tract that blocks the air coming from lungs. (p. 235/9th ed.) Human would first inhale some air into their lungs and then push the air through vocal cords that consist of glottis, larynx, and pharynx and finally through oral cavities and nasal cavities. (p. 235/9th ed.) In this way, human can make Bilibial, Labiodental, Interdental, Alveolar, Palatal, Velar and Glottal. However, considering stumans, without the connection, the air can only go through nasal cavities and lungs and thus there is no air in oral cavity only if stumans inhale air into mouth. Therefore, stumans are not able to articulate most of the sounds like oral sounds. For example, they cannot produce [b], [d], and [g]. Nonetheless, even though stumans’ nasal cavities and oral cavities are not connected, stuman can still pronounce clicks and nasals. To illustrate, stumans, with two closures that are one forward and one at back in their mouths, articulate clicks like bilabial, dental, (post) alveolar, palatoalveolar and alveolar lateral. Moreover,