In a cold climate, do people often blow out the air from their lungs a lot when
ID: 35873 • Letter: I
Question
In a cold climate, do people often blow out the air from their lungs a lot when living in the cold condition to keep their lungs warm?
I asked this question because it could connect to how people in different area construct the sound.
Example, the Germanic type of Language (German, English,...) uses a lot of air from Lung to construct the sound?
Is that because the European living in cold climate that they often blow off a lot of air from the lung out to keep warm & gradually they construct the sound via that way.
For people living in warm climate ex(Sino-Tibetan language like Chinese, Thai), we mostly use tongue to construct the sound, we use very little air from lung to make sound.
I posted this question to some forums & some people said it
Explanation / Answer
Heat loss hypothesis:
I would rather think that blowing while speaking means that one has to inspire often and therefore he would lose much heat by convection. According this hypothesis, I would rather expect to see southern people blowing lots while speaking.
Metabolism hypothesis:
We might say that at low temperature the metabolism increases and therefore the consumption of oxygen should increase. As shown here for example. This would make blowing much air more profitable for people living in cold environments.
Articulation hypothesis:
One might as well hypothesize that the cold would tend to make articulation more complex and using much air would help to be well understood.
It would be interesting to look at many local scales if it is indeed true that the colder the more air people use. At global scale, I am afraid that the observations are quite dependent and statistically speaking, there is not much evidence that cold environment correlates with blowing much air while speaking