Phonemic vowel length
Many languages have phonemic long and short vowels: Japanese, Finnish, Hungarian, etc.
Estonian has three distinctive lengths, but the third is suprasegmental, as it has developed from the allophonic variation caused by now-deleted grammatical markers. For example, half-long 'aa' in saada comes from the agglutination *saata+ka "send+(imperative)", and the overlong 'aa' in saada comes from *saa+ta "get+(infinitive)". One of the very few languages to have three lengths, independent of vowel quality or syllable structure, is Mixe. An example from Mixe is [po?] "guava", [po??] "spider", [po??] "knot". Similar claims have been made for Yavapai and Wichita.
Four-way distinctions have been claimed, but these are actually long-short distinctions on adjacent syllables. For example, in kiKamba, there is [ko.ko.na], [kóó.ma], [ko.óma], [nétónubáné.éet?] "hit", "dry", "bite", "we have chosen for everyone and are still choosing".
― unnamedroffler (xave), Sunday, 30 July 2006 00:08 (nineteen years ago)
Spider Cries Out While Mating Ker Than
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com
Sat Jul 29, 10:30 AM ET
Humans aren't the only creatures that vocalize during sex.
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While mating, female Physocylus globosus spiders emit high-frequency squeaks to let males know what they should be doing, a new study finds.
Multimedia Audio and Video of the spiders mating
Called stridulations, the shrill cries sound like squeaky leather and are made in response to the rhythmic squeezing actions of the male's genitalia from inside the female during sex.
Upping the odds
Female spiders are able to store sperm from different males inside their bodies and can choose which lucky male spider gets to fertilize her eggs. Squeezing stimulates the females and raises a male's chances that his sperm will be selected.
"Males that squeezed females more often during copulation sired more offspring than males that squeezed less often," said study team member William Eberhard of the Universidad de Costa Rica and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
However, if done too forcefully, the action can physically damage the female. If a male squeezes too hard or too long, the female squeaks to let him know to pick up the pace but to take it easy.
The finding will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the journal Animal Behavior.
How it works
To produce the squeaking sounds, females scrape a part of their "pedipalp"—a leg-like appendage located near their mouths—against the file-like surface of their fangs, or "chelicera."
A male spider's genitalia are located at the end of its pedipalp. During sex, he inserts this tip into the female. Muscles near the base of the pedipalp flex during sex, creating the rhythmic squeezing motions that cause a female to cry out. [Images]
The researchers mated 68 virgin P. globosus females with two males. They found that the number of squeezes the males made were associated with the number of times the females cried out during sex. Stridulations became more frequent if males failed to loosen a squeeze in response to a previous plea.
Obedient males that consistently followed the female's directions ended up siring more offspring. It's thought that the squeezing motion propels the male's sperm deeper into the female's body, where it is more likely to fertilize her eggs.
"Females presumably favored the paternity of males that could stimulate them, thereby obtaining sons that were better stimulators and thus more able to induce females to fertilize their eggs with their sperm," Eberhard told LiveScience.
― Mr Jones (Mr Jones), Sunday, 30 July 2006 11:44 (nineteen years ago)
ten months pass...
four years pass...
thirteen years pass...