consonants

I was sitting at my computer browsing Facebook photos and eating cannoli filling from a measuring cup because it wasn't thick enough to fill cannoli shells and there are no clean bowls. Meanwhile the Storyteller sat behind me inventing a language, starting with the alphabet. (I had zones out on him while he was lecturing me on communicative and associative properties of various math propblems, something he learned not from me but from a book so he pronounces communicative to rhyme with commune behive. I didn't correct him because it was cute.)

So anyway, there I was, being the homeschool mom anti-homeschoolers imagine, when the boy asked me a Good Question. "All alphabets start with a vowel but this one has no vowels. Do they?"

"Do they all?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know."

"Well can you look it up?"

"Oh. Oh, right. Sure."

"Now I have to make up letters for all these consonants. Hey, Mama? Are these all the consonants?"

"All the consonants that people have ever had letters to represent?"

"Yeah."

Does anyone know a linguist I could talk to for a few minutes? I will send him cannoli filling soup if he answers one small boy's question or three.

We did find a cool audio chart of consonants, leading to a good question of my own. If we had a piano that played all of these sounds, could we play words with our fingers, and what would that sound like?

To that, the Storyteller replied, "That would sound like Stephen Hawking."

I still want to try it.