Christopher (link077) wrote in linguaphiles,
Christopher
link077
linguaphiles
So I'm taking my first semester of Japanese, and today we learned the hiragana　は、ひ、ふ、へ、ほ (ha, hi, hu, he, ho). Our instructor was talking about pronunciation and noted that Japanese speakers make the 'h' sound with their ears. This was of course a joke (she went on to describe how to practice it: if your hair puffs out you're pronouncing it correctly), but I started to think about it some more after class. The ears are connected to the pharynx, after all. So:

1. Was my instructor's comment about ear pronunciation in Japanese based in any kind of truth?

2. Are there any languages that involve the ears in speech production?
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