Are there animal teeth that make alien sounds?

Question

There's this old trope where an alien being has a name that "can't be pronounced by the human tongue", but no one (afaik) has ever done the work to make that scientifically possible. Now, I'm not talking about completely alien creatures lest the conjecture becomes crazy, so I'm limiting it to animals that already exist.

Is there an existing configuration of animal teeth/lips/tongue that, without a special throat configuration, could theoretically pronounce a consonant sound that human teeth/lips/tongue cannot produce, but human ears can hear?

Answer 1

Have you ever wondered how a cat purrs? How it makes the sound, I mean.

Purring comes from the throat rather than the mouth, but bear with me, I'm going somewhere with this: it turns out that the rhythm of a cat's purr is generated in the brain rather than the throat. It's sort of like they're just saying "gugugugugugu" really quickly, and they have a special neural circuit that makes it possible to do it that fast and consistently.

Now imagine that your aliens' throats and mouths have completely human anatomy, but their brains are different, and in particular, they have special neural oscillators like the ones cats use to purr. Unlike a cat, these oscillators control the movement of the tongue rather than the throat. This allows them to move their tongue in a rhythmic motion much quicker than any human could. Imagine if someone could say "kakakakakakakaka" so quickly that the syllables merged together into a single purr-like tone. Such a sound couldn't be produced by any human tongue, but it's probably quite anatomically plausible.

Answer 2

Easy, birds.

Birds have a syrinx (compared to a mammal’s larynx) which is a set of binary vocal cords that enable them to emit two different sounds at once. This is what enables songbirds to produce such long yet rapid songs. These beings could have a syrinx which makes their names unpronounceable to humans, because it requires the speaker to produce two sets of syllables at the same time.

Answer 3

For real animal noises, crocodiles and aligators make drum thump noises when their mouths snap shut. Humans can make drum thump noises but only as vowels, so we couldn't vocalize another sound over it. Rodents grind/chatter their teeth (bruxing); humans can do this but we are too big to do it at the same frequency, and it is injurious to us to do it for long.

I suspect that scaling humans up or down is an easier way to make the sounds you're asking about than looking for animals. If whistles count as consonants and unproducible notes count as unproducible sounds, it would be easy to imagine a mouth configuration that could produce a lower or higher register than humans can duplicate, just by scaling the relevant parts up or down, exactly as scaling up a flute makes flute sounds that a smaller flute cannot duplicate. Unvoiced tongue and lip trills would likewise be easy to scale up or down, creating trill rates lower or higher than humans can duplicate. Since humans come in a variety of shapes and sizes, with plenty of humans in any extreme, there are plenty of humans that can make lip/tongue/teeth based consonant sounds that most other humans are physiologically incapable of making, simply because they have different mouth shapes.

If you allowed real structures other than real animal lips, tongues, and teeth, but still excluding throat configurations, it's easy to imagine something like a rattlesnake tail as a mouth part, or even a person with little jingle bells as lip piercings, who could easily create jingly consonant sounds that no unmodified human could ever duplicate.

If you allow for inability to produce certain sounds without extensive training, there are many human languages that other humans cannot duplicate. For an extreme example, see: Taa, which is almost impossible for adult learners to reproduce - but less difficult examples are everywhere. Think of the Korean consonant b/p consonant bieup, which most English-speakers can't produce, or the English z, which most Korean speakers can't produce. An alien with the perfectly human name Zachary Hill who encountered Korean astronauts might reasonably conclude that his name was entirely "unpronounceable in your human tongue". An alien with the perfectly human name ǃnˤù.ṵ would find the same for almost any variety of human astronaut, unless the Taa beat the rest of us to first contact.

Answer 4

This is an "almost." When I was younger, I would sometimes try to do a tense bilabial fricative (as if playing a trumpet) and hum at the same time. It was VERY hard to do and impossible (for me) to maintain for even a half-second.

But an anteater's tongue is so different from ours that I'm sure they could produce sounds we cannot. And I suspect an elephant can make sounds we can't. The only reason aliens on TV look so much like humans is that they are portrayed by humans. Some being that developed light-years from here—why should we expect them to have any resemblance to any terrestrial creature?

Some human languages have sounds made "ingressive"—with air going inward. But we are quite limited in what we can do that way. With a different mouth shape (if they have mouths) and different lungs (if they have lungs), who knows?