Note: Tie marker as vocal parameter. Long strophic segements among American Indians and breathless singing among Eskimos and Siberians of the Arctic circle. Tie markers in speech has not been studied much by linguists. Tone languages - distribution of as possible tool for study of function of melody. In the West speech melody primarily used for emphasis. Alan Lomax: Thesis of Cantometrics is that style is a communication form but not the substance. Style reflects cultural shape but substance is a more complex problem. Language is a subsystem of gross linguistic style traits. Swadesh: I expect to see in culture and linguistics a conflict beween immediate impulses and historical background at a particular moment. Lomax on the contrast between European song-style (simple, factual, symmetrical) and African (integrated, open-ended). Word frequency counts in folktales as indicators of cultural preoccupations. Swadesh: Relationship of consonants to vowels. African languages eliminate middle consonants and add elements to make up for it. Bantu languages largely tonal. Tones replace consonants as indicators. Semitic languages are based on three consonants. Swadesh: Certain sound distinctions once existed in Indo-European languages and are now gone, example: back and front k sounds disappeared in Indo-European. One can trace when certain sounds ceased to have lexical meaning and merged with other sounds in Russian. Lomax: Are back consonants more primitive? Swadesh: When mouth is opened widest velar (back) area is most in contact. Babies begin babbling with all sounds, playing with sounds. Some use simplified system when begin talking, however. Swadesh's son eliminated back consonants at first. Lomax: As internal inflection becomes simpler, external inflections become more common (suffixes and prefixes). Refrains and non-sense syllables make good material for studies of linguistic sound shifts. Psychomorphs. Traces of previous meaning systems remain in language sounds, for example, the l sound denoting light, deceit, glancing (diminutive "ulus" in Latin, "ling" in Germanic.) There is a psychological and a historical aspect. Joan Halifax: Do words for "little" use a smaller area of the mouth.