Is there a non-physiological way of distinguishing vowel sounds from consonant sounds?

Is there a non-physiological way of distinguishing vowel sounds from consonant sounds?
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answer:Well, I’d suggest that it’s pretty much impossible to give a phenomenological account of how a vowel sounds different from a consonant – that would be circular. Formation of a consonant sound involves obstruction of the airflow. Formation of a vowel doesn’t. As for the clicking languages, it’s very much a matter of what you’re used to – I’m sure for the speakers, it’s a perfectly natural way of communicating. There’s some indication that they were even among the first human languages. Chinese uses intonation as a morpheme, so there’s no reason (apart from the total impracticality) why the sound of a bell can’t be used in communication. Incidentally, check out Silbo Gomero and Pirahã – Silbo Gomero speaks for itself, and Pirahã has a complex prosodic system that (allegedly) allows its speakers to communicate without forming consonants. I guess for another way to describe consonant or vowel sounds, you could do a computer-based analysis of the waveforms produced by each sound. Perhaps the vowel sounds will have more regular waveforms closer to a sine wave, while consonant sounds (maybe excluding the nasal consonant phonemes [m], [n], etc…) will have somewhat spikier waveforms. I’ve never seen such an analysis, though. Doubtless one exists somewhere that will (dis)confirm the hypothesis.
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