How might spoken language (vowels) be different for Fire Breathers with fine temperature control?

Question

I'm writing up a conlang for a story wherein there exists a society of foreign creatures who are very physiologically diverse. Some are mammallian, others avian, reptilian, and some more fantastical. With all these different

When reading this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics#Airflow I came across the following sentence:

For all practical purposes, temperature can be treated as constant in the articulatory system.

This got me wondering if there could be anything special to creatures for whom this sentence isn't true. Maybe they might be able to incorporate certain whistles or tones that humans would find difficult/impossible? Perhaps they might have entirely different sounding vowels we're not capable of articulating?

I went searching online for anyone else who has thought about this and came up dry. If anybody knows of something like maybe a story about dragons communicating in a denser language than humans in the story, or anything like that, I would appreciate it! As I would also appreciate any thoughts or ideas on the subject.

Answer 1

What that line means is that, inside the human body, the air exhaled from the lungs is warmed to the body's core temperature. Thus any sounds made with that air will be made with air of relatively constant temperature and thus relatively constant tonal properties (speed of sound, pitch, etc).

Short answer: not a whole lot of difference. And assuming their vocal anatomy isn't terribly different than ours.

Obviously, in a fire breathing species, there is the potential for sound to be made using much higher temperature exhalant. The most striking sound such people could make is the channeled sound of internal combustion itself. Kind of like the roar you get with a fire or a good propane torch. This is an artifact of waste gasses being expelled from the combustion chamber, not really of much use in language. Could certainly be used the way we use roars and hisses and so forth --- exclamations of emotion. This is a sound humans can emulate, however, so not really unique.

The only other phenomenon I can think of off hand is their voices might change pitch slightly due to the changed density of the hot air being exhaled. Kind of like how a person's vocal pitch becomes higher when they inhale less dense helium and deeper when they inhale SF6. Hot air and hot steam are much less dense than air at STP. Chances are good Smaug wouldn't sound anything like Cumberbatch's rich tones once he heats up his dialogue a bit!

But ultimately, you're not really going to get any different or extra vowel sounds that such a person could not already produce using ordinary temperature air. The vowel (and consonant) sounds we can produce are effects of anatomy rather than temperature of exhaled gas.

Answer 2

The temperature is not significant, as such. Anyone that has used oxy-acytaline for welding or cutting knows the sound of the gas can vary quite a lot. Enough to be useful as a language, sure. Consider the speed at which we control sounds, while oxy-acyteline is slower in our world we use fingers on knobs to make the adjustment. Inherently slower than mouth shape.

The speed at which the sound can change is quick enough that it might compare with human voice. Mouth shape, gas mix, circular breathing, gas flow or a saliva-type gland to mix fuel with oxy laden air. Interesting problem as running out of fuel means reduced communication as well as defense/offense issues.

Examples; slow exhale with too much gas will be guttural (aka too little oxy) the carburizing flame. An oxidizing flames hisses and roars. Sounds like dragons, little, polite dragons anyway. A full on shout, could be quite loud. A cough, with a small fireball for a laugh. That would be fun.

You might consider pyrophoricity, two fuels that burn on contact with each other, check out SR-71 Fuel. The one for starting the engines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird#Fuel