Skip to content

Universal 362:

Posted in Universals Archive

Universal 362:

Original
(a)The utterance of the consonants with strong pressure of breath from the chest (as in aspirates, affricates, or in guttural consonants) corresponds to strength of purpose in the language community. (b) The tense and full utterance of consonants corresponds to laborious and active habits respectively, with easy life and indolence producing softly and imperfectly uttered consonants instead. (c) The unrestricted concurrence of consonants in consonant clusters corresponds to versatility, the restricted variety in their concurrence to tenacity. (d) The predominance of consonants (more adapted for the transmission of that representation to the sense of the hearer) corresponds to thoughtfulness, while the predominance of vowels over consonants corresponds to thoughtfulness and talkativeness.
Standardized
(a)The utterance of the consonants with strong pressure of breath from the chest (as in aspirates, affricates, or in guttural consonants) corresponds to strength of purpose in the language community. (b) The tense and full utterance of consonants corresponds to laborious and active habits respectively, with easy life and indolence producing softly and imperfectly uttered consonants instead. (c) The unrestricted concurrence of consonants in consonant clusters corresponds to versatility, the restricted variety in their concurrence to tenacity. (d) The predominance of consonants (more adapted for the transmission of that representation to the sense of the hearer) corresponds to thoughtfulness, while the predominance of vowels over consonants corresponds to thoughtfulness and talkativeness.
Keywords
consonant, vowel, consonant clusters, aspiration
Domain
phonology, culture/mind
Type
mutual implication
Status
achronic
Quality
?
Basis
unspecified
Source
culled from Byrne 1885: Plank 1996, Plank 1998
Counterexamples

One Comment

  1. FP
    FP

    See syntactic correlate in #654.

    1. May 2020

Comments are closed.