John Colapinto’s book This is the Voice (Bookshop|Amazon) is a fascinating look at the miracle of the human voice and how it distinguishes our own species from others. The book is an invigorating mix of science, history, linguistics, and personal narrative. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “A Book About the Miracle of the Human Voice”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. John Colapinto is a writer for The New Yorker, and in his spare time he sang in a rock band very loudly.
And this led to a polyp on one of his vocal cords and a very noticeable rasp.
And it’s a problem that sometimes can be fixed with surgery, but the operation is risky and delicate.
And as Colapinto began looking into that surgery, he found himself increasingly fascinated by the whole idea of the human voice,
About the fact that there’s so much that we take for granted about our own voice,
And about the fact that we manage to communicate thought and emotions on, as he puts it,
Tiny ripples of air that we beam into other people’s brains by moving our lips and tongue while exhaling.
And the result is Colapinto’s new book. It’s called This is the Voice, and Grant, it is wonderful. I know that you and our listeners will really dig it because it combines history and science and linguistics and personal narrative all in a way that you’d expect from a writer for The New Yorker.
For example, until I read his book, I hadn’t understood that it’s actually anatomically impossible for newborns to form most of the sounds we use for language because of where their voice box, their larynx, is located.
It turns out a baby’s larynx is tucked up in the back of the mouth.
This positioning helps them suck steadily on milk, but as a result, babies don’t have a resonating chamber in the throat, and that limits the range of sounds that they can form.
It’s only later, once they transition to solid food, that the larynx drops lower.
And it sets the stage for babies to start creating that much broader array of sounds.
And what’s really fascinating is that the larynx of a Neanderthal, like the larynx of a chimpanzee,
Sat higher in the neck than our own one does.
So this lowering of the larynx as every baby grows mirrors the larger evolutionary picture,
And it helps lead to the miracle of language itself.
And he also covers research about a lot of topics that you and I have covered on the show,
Things like language acquisition, the development of regional accents,
Vocal fry prejudices toward people who speak differently, all those things.
And he talks about the work of linguists we’ve mentioned many times on the show.
And along the way, he also talks about how opera singers train their voices,
How demagogues use language and vocal delivery to incite their followers.
So, Grant, it’s really an exhilarating read.
It’s this wide swath through this topic that we all take for granted, and I think it’s a must for language enthusiasts.
I want to argue with something there, though.
I would argue that babies do have a resonating chamber.
Really?
I think I’m partially deaf in my right ear because my son had a resonating chamber.
Well, yeah.
I tease.
I tease.
I tease.
I believe him.
What he was saying was that they can’t make the full articulation of all the different sounds.
Exactly.
All the phonemes required to really complete the English language and be a full speaker of the language.
Exactly. That’s it.
And he does talk about how that first screech of a baby and those early vocalizations are really pure.
And singers, opera singers, for example, have to work to get back to that ability that babies have to project the sound the way they do.
But I found that so fascinating that your larynx actually moves down, and that’s what gives you the room to make the more sophisticated sounds.
And this explains also why you are able to teach a baby sign language before they can learn spoken word,
Because they are capable of doing the hand movements before they’re capable of doing things with their mouth or things with their vocal cords.
I didn’t even think about that. But yeah, that’s a great point.
Well, it does sound like a lovely book. Can you tell us again what the book is?
It’s called This is the Voice, and it’s by John Colapinto.
And as always, we’ll put a link to that book on the show description when we post it to the website.
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