What are the longest sequence of vowels in a natural language that you know of? Be aware that this is an orthographic question, not a phonetical.
Please state word, language and translation.
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How do you define an "orthographic vowel"? – musicallinguist Dec 9 '14 at 21:11
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Good question... Vowels in writing. Probably would depend on the language. Is the language using that specific letter regarding that as a vowel? I think semi-vowels will be troublesome... Do you have any examples of words where this problem arises? – Flying Dec 9 '14 at 21:15
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Well I was wondering about the letter y in your own examples from Norwegian below. I don't know too much about Norwegian, but I don't think the sound represented by y is syllabic, phonologically speaking, so I'm not sure I'd count it as representing a vowel. – musicallinguist Dec 9 '14 at 21:17
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Yes, in the examples I gave from Norwegian it is a semi-vowel, pronounced as j. But y is still ortographically a vowel in Norwegian. – Flying Dec 9 '14 at 21:20
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4I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is a trivia question. – curiousdannii Mar 10 '15 at 7:41
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Hooiaioia in Hawaiian (meaning certified), with 8 vowels, seems to have the most consecutive vowels in current human speech. It is also listed in 1976 Guinness Book of World Records.
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@Flying Do you mean which record it set? It's probably about the vowels, but I don't know where to search for that properly to be honest. – Alenanno♦ Dec 9 '14 at 21:37
Avestan āuuōiia “woe!” has seven (orthographic) vowels in succession.
Avestan kāuuaiiasca “and evil rulers” has eight.
(In both cases this is a one-to-one transliteration of the Avestan script, which is unfortunately not available in Unicode.)
6 vowels. Saueøye (sheep eye, in Norwegian. This is a real life example)
9 vowels. Saueøyeeier (the owner of the sheep eye, a constructed word)
7 vowels. Niøyeøye (the eye of a fish called Niøye, not very common word, but possible)
12 vowels. Niøyeøyeøyeier (the owner of an island named after the eye of a fish called Niøye, this is a constructed word, but still understandable)
