Wait, people would just call somewhere and say the extension? That sounds awfully rude to me. Wouldn't you normally say, "Hi, can I have extension 432, please?"<p>It does the same thing the article says, but you sound like a decent human being.
I fully support being polite, but there's a lot more to vowels than relative pitch. When speaking a vowel, the geometry of your mouth creates multiple resonant frequencies. The ratio among those frequencies is far more important than the ratio of the dominant frequency of one vowel to the dominant frequency of the next.<p>Consider a couple of examples:<p>1. A trombone can't say "I Owe You", despite the fact that it can produce any dominant frequency, and that phrase contains only vowels.<p>2. Voice "Ahhhhhhhhhhhh", going from a high to a low pitch (I imagine the doppler effect of a cartoon screaming as he rides by on a cart), and then voice "Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh" in the same fashion. At every point, they sound different. You can't take a clip from an arbitrary pitch range of an Ah and convince someone its an Oh.<p>3. Shape your lips like you would for oo as in Moon, Noon, or Spoon, and try make the ea vowel as in Squeak just by changing your pitch. It won't happen. You'll get the German ö, but not the English ea.
Are you sure this isn't a troll? It's so easily disprovable.<p>Here's a sound clip of an adult male speaking, followed by a young boy.<p>Do you honestly have trouble understanding the number the boy says?<p><a href="http://soi.kd6.us/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/sound.mp3" rel="nofollow">http://soi.kd6.us/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/sound.mp3</a>
On a related note, the Oatmeal just posted 10 reasons to avoid talking on the phone:<p><a href="http://theoatmeal.com/comics/phone" rel="nofollow">http://theoatmeal.com/comics/phone</a>
this is particularly true (in my limited experience) if you're not a native speaker - saying something like "hello i'd like to talk to extension 123" gives people a chance to figure out your accent. also, like smiling, saying something friendly encourages people to make an effort to understand you.
Very interesting. I think phone skills are something a lot of people overlook.<p>I don't have the resources to do a study on this, but another tip is to smile when you talk on the phone. It might just be because my voice is deeper (making something like a smiling face lets you hit higher notes when singing too), but it seems like people understand me faster on the phone when I do this.
The word "the" serves a similar purpose, to reset the vocal tract so the next word can be resolved more easily than if it was following an arbitrary word.
Sounds like a good practical explanation why in some cultures (French, for example), it's practically mandatory to say the equivalent of "Hello" and other pleasantries before getting to the actual content of the conversation.
I'd like to see this theory put to the test. Get a number of differently-sized individuals record "see" or "saw" and test the ability of native speakers to identify which they heard.