LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Languages: South America
built 661 days ago
On the basis of the Luiseno, Papago, and Aztec words cited above, linguists have proposed the reconstruction of initial p sound in the words for "water" and "road" in the Proto-Uto-Aztecan ancestor of the three languages in question. The sounds systems and vocabulary of the ancestors of a number of different American Indian language families have been partially reconstructed through similarly detailed analysis by linguists. Comparison of these reconstructed protolanguages leads to more informed conjecture about earlier connections between the ancestor languages and the peoples who spoke them.
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Languages not only differ in the frequencies they use, they ... differ in the length of the syllables. Pronouncing them within the right time frame is the second most important factor in speaking a foreign language well. On average it takes 75 milliseconds to pronounce an American syllable, much longer than the emission time of a French syllable (50 milliseconds). If you want to learn French, for instance, you will have to learn to pronounce the syllables more quickly. According to Tomatis that means that your ears have to react more rapidly. This can be achieved by retraining the ear.
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Recent estimates place the number of Meso American Indian languages at about 70, with at least 5 million speakers. Of course, language boundaries and political boundaries do not coincide. The Hokan and Aztec-Tanoan phyla of North America ... include a number of Central or Meso-American languages, and some South American groups have outlying representatives in Central America. Many of the groupings in Table 2 are still highly controversial.
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South America