52
votes
Accepted
What is the longest word without a vowel in any language?
The question could be interpreted as being about "vowel letters". "Twyndyllyngs" is a candidate: said to come from Welsh. If we take "vowels" to be the letters [ieaou], ...
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26
votes
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What is the function of the soft sign (Ь) in Russian?
WARNING: The question is sooo many-sided, it is very wide and can be split into at least 3 different questions. I'll answer it all, don't tell me later that you haven't been warned the answer would be ...
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23
votes
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Why were vowels secondary citizens in many of the worlds sound-based writing systems?
In Ancient Egyptian, like many Afro-Asiatic languages, the consonants generally determine the root of a word, while the vowels inflect it. Sāḏam means "to hear", saḏma means "might hear&...
- 63.8k
20
votes
Are there languages with more vowels than consonants?
Probably the best-known and most often-cited example of this is Danish.
Danish is generally said to have around 17 or 18 consonant phonemes, a fairly invariant number. The number of vowel phonemes ...
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16
votes
In Classical/Biblical Hebrew, why is CHAF not considered a guttural?
Alef, He, Ḥet, Ayin are the names of the phonemes originally pronounced [ʔ h ħ ʕ], which are phonetically laryngeals and pharyngeals, sometimes known by the cover term "guttural". Kaf [k] ...
- 81.9k
15
votes
Why isn't the American r considered a vowel?
Many phonologists do consider "r" in "girl" to be a vowel, I being one. There are many reasons for people to consider it to not be a vowel. First, in "rabbit", nobody ...
- 81.9k
14
votes
Accepted
What are the differences between palatal consonant and palatalized consonant?
Theoretically, there is a difference in most cases.
In IPA, the raised j symbol <ʲ>, represents "palatalization," or a "palatal secondary articulation." The concept of a "secondary articulation" ...
- 17.8k
14
votes
What is the longest word without a vowel in any language?
There's a word (a sentence actually) in the Canadian language Bella Coola (aka Nuxalk) that only consists of obstruents (no vowels at all) and is longer than the Czech word you mentioned in the ...
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13
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Is there a voiced-unvoiced pair for R or L in any language?
As leoboiko mentioned, there are languages with voiceless liquids, like Icelandic.
In the IPA, they are simply transcribed with a voicelessness ring diacritic: [r̥] and [l̥].
In Icelandic, these ...
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13
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Is there a theory challenging the "strict" distinction between Thai and Vietnamese?
There is a theory, applicable to all human languages, that is even encoded in what certain words mean in linguistics. Namely, "related" is taken to be a claim about genetic (historical) relations ...
- 81.9k
12
votes
Non-African Click Languages
Not even African languages in general: clicks seem to have originated only in the Khoisan language "family" (*), and spread from there into neighboring languages. In other words, clicks don't seem to ...
- 63.8k
12
votes
Are there languages with more vowels than consonants?
The conventional understanding of "phoneme" is that it is a segment. There is vast disagreement over what constitutes a "segment". Given that, one example of a language with many ...
- 81.9k
11
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Is there some equivalent of a "Grimm's law" that applies to the Semitic language family?
Quite a lot of them, in fact!
Grimm's Law is probably the most famous description of a regular sound change. But there are an enormous number of these in historical linguistics, some named, some not.
...
- 63.8k
11
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Why were vowels secondary citizens in many of the worlds sound-based writing systems?
One reason is that vowels are much less important for distinguishing words than you might think. Years ago I did an analysis of the Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing dictionary. I asked what would happen if ...
- 511
11
votes
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Are there languages with more vowels than consonants?
I have yet to see anyone bring up the Iau language of West Papua, Indonesia, which has only 6 phonemic consonants (not counting allophony) but 8 vowel qualities even before accounting for diphthongs ...
- 334
9
votes
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What's up with the letter W?
"W" developed as a standard, distinct letter by about the 17th century, taking its sweet time getting there. It is the result of standardizing a ligature of "vv", ramming the letters together. Bear in ...
- 81.9k
9
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What's up with the letter W?
Don't take spelling too seriously, it's often conventional and arbitrary. Language is primarily a spoken thing rather than a string of written letters. Don't confuse sounds (phonemes) with their ...
- 2,549
9
votes
Accepted
What does '# of Cs' mean?
Tragically, the letter "#" has two meanings. In linguistics, it is used to refer to a word boundary. More generally (i.e. not in the special usage of linguists), it (the number sign) stands for "...
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9
votes
Accepted
The German consonant "c" changes to the English "g"
You'll notice that all of these words include ch in German and gh in English. These originally represented the same sound: a voiceless velar fricative, written as /x/ in the International Phonetic ...
- 63.8k
8
votes
Accepted
How unusual is the English J sound?
The English "j" sound is a voiced postalveolar affricate, transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dʒ/. It is indeed the voiced counterpart to the voiceless "ch" sound /tʃ/.
The phones [...
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8
votes
Accepted
The difference between a regular consonant and a syllabic consonant
One way to get a better grasp of the phonetics of syllabic consonants is to listen to a minimal pair in a language that has them, such as here. This is the pair [mbááŋgàà m̩̀bááŋgàà] (in that order) ...
- 81.9k
8
votes
Why isn't intervocalic /ŋ/ analyzed as an onset in English?
The first reason for [sɪŋ.ɪŋ] is the premise that [ŋ] only appears in the coda. The main argument for that conclusion is the analogy between word position and syllable position. Steriade has some ...
- 81.9k
8
votes
How to Tell Apart Voiced Consonants and Unaspirated Unvoiced Consonants
There is no general solution, other than practice, practice, practice. The most important thing to understand is that purported /p,b,pʰ/ are not the same in all languages, so you have to learn them in ...
- 81.9k
8
votes
Accepted
Where can I find a list of phonetically possible consonant clusters?
There aren't any "phonetically impossible clusters". If you can articulate [ʔ], you can do that and they articulate [k], followed by [q], then [g], and so on. "Phonetically impossible&...
- 81.9k
7
votes
Is there a voiced-unvoiced pair for R or L in any language?
I'm sure there's a lot, but one example would be Icelandic.
hlít /l̥iːt/ ‘throughly’
lít /liːt/ ‘I look; you look’
hraða /r̥aːða/ ‘to speed up’
raða /raːða/ ‘to put in order; to employ’
Of course, ...
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7
votes
Is there a voiced-unvoiced pair for R or L in any language?
Welsh has 'rh' and 'll' as the unvoiced counterparts of 'r' and 'l'.
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7
votes
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Why r, h, and w aren't vowels
The International Phonetic Alphabet draws a very arbitrary distinction between consonants and vowels, and categorizes them completely separately. But in truth, there's not any major phonetic ...
- 63.8k
7
votes
Dataset/Database similar to WALS in Vowel/Phonology
There is the famous UPSID database: http://phonetics.linguistics.ucla.edu/sales/software.htm
- 1,517
7
votes
Accepted
Non-African Click Languages
This is an example of areal phonetics, where certain phonetic properties are relatively widely exploited in one area, but is rare (or nonexistent) elsewhere. Another example is labiovelars such as [kp]...
- 81.9k
7
votes
Accepted
Are consonants more stable than vowels?
There are some factors that make vowels more volatile than consonants in general
Consonants have fixed points of articulation and modes of articulation while vowels live in a continuous space
In most ...
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