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], ...
- 82.1k
34
votes
Accepted
Why vowels sound different from each other
Good question! This comes down to formants.
Any periodic sound (from a violin, a trumpet, a guitar, or a human voice, among many many others) can be written as the sum of a whole bunch of sine waves ...
- 64k
23
votes
Accepted
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&...
- 64k
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 ...
- 3,953
19
votes
Accepted
Why are letters with a stroke not decomposed in Unicode?
Contrary to what the other answers have stated, the Unicode Standard does not actually care whether Ø or Ð or any other character is “fundamentally a different letter” or not, whatever that may even ...
- 306
17
votes
Accepted
Is there such a thing as an L colored vowel?
Short answer: yes, but it's not as interesting.
"R-colored vowels" are vowels that have are pronounced more like [ɝ], which is somewhat similar to [ɹ]. [ɝ] is a very interesting vowel, ...
- 64k
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 ...
- 82.1k
14
votes
Accepted
Why is vowel phonology represented in a trapezoid instead of a square?
The original reason was, "[æ] and [ɑ] sound less different than [i] and [u]". It seemed intuitively like there was less "space" between front and back low vowels, so they drew less space on that part ...
- 64k
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 ...
- 1,379
14
votes
Accepted
Do the qualities of a vowel determine its semivowel’s place of articulation?
Yes, fundamentally and inextricably.
One of the weaknesses of the International Phonetic Alphabet is that it has entirely separate and unrelated ways of describing the articulation of consonants and ...
- 64k
13
votes
Accepted
If Hebrew is written without vowels can there be multiple interpretations?
While there can always be some ambiguity, Hebrew and other Semitic languages have a system of triconsonantal roots, in which each sequence of three consonants suggests the meaning of the word. For ...
- 148
12
votes
Accepted
Which language has the most vowel phonemes?
This is one of those "it depends" questions. Dinka (Bor dialect) has the vowels [i e ɛ ɔ o u a], as well as long and over-long versions of these (21 vowels), and 4 phonatory contrasts (breathy, hollow,...
- 82.1k
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 ...
- 82.1k
11
votes
Why vowels sound different from each other
Just wanted to add this diagram which shows the subjective vowel sounds as they correspond to the combination of F1 and F2 formants in a two-dimensional chart. The chart is from this page of the ...
- 217
11
votes
Accepted
How Hebrew Vowels Work
Perhaps it is helpful to understand some of the history behind this mixed system.
Originally, Hebrew was never written with niqudot (diacritics added above, below, or within consonantal signs; ...
- 3,768
11
votes
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
Accepted
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
11
votes
Accepted
How close are the Italian and the Romanian open central unrounded vowels?
Short answer: there is more variation than what is expected, but the data could be interpreted 'on average' to show that Romanian has more instances of a back /a/ than Italian.
The /a/ phoneme covers ...
- 7,281
10
votes
Which languages have words containing the same letter three times in a row?
Japanese has a prefix ō-, meaning "big" and pronounced as a long "o" (as if pronouncing two "o"s in a row), which in kana writing is おお. If this prefix is added to any word starting with お, you'll ...
- 4,960
10
votes
Accepted
What were the Proto-Bantu -ATR vowels?
The pool is small enough that the concept of "consensus" is mildly anomalous, but I think the consensus would be that we can't tell what the proto vowel system was phonetically. The standard view is ...
- 82.1k
10
votes
What is the difference between two symbols: /i/ and /ɪ/?
In Southern Standard British English, also know as RP, there are two highish, frontish unrounded vowels: the FLEECE and KIT vowels, /i:/ and /ɪ/. The former is the vowel heard in the word fleece, the ...
- 3,962
9
votes
Which languages have words containing the same letter three times in a row?
In Tagalog, maaari is a fairly common word used to mean "can" or "able to".
- 91
9
votes
Accepted
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 ...
- 82.1k
9
votes
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
GVS similarity in cognate words other Germanic Languages
The mainstream hypothesis is that the vowel found in words like white was pronounced as something like [iː] (a long close front vowel, like that in Modern German bieten) in Common Germanic, and then ...
- 17.8k
8
votes
Accepted
Does regular vowel dissimilation/disharmony exist?
In the realm of regular synchronic processes, vowel dissimilation is relatively uncommon (dissimilation itself is uncommon, and vowel-to-vowel dissimilation is most uncommon); however, it does exist. ...
- 82.1k
8
votes
Accepted
Is it possible for a word-initial vowel to not have a glottal stop before it?
English words with vowel initial tend to get a glottal stop. This occurs in most dialects, so a native speaker wouldn’t notice its presence or absence; they will just hear it as a “normal” vowel.
...
- 8,599
8
votes
Accepted
How many different vowels are there?
Nobody knows, and it's an experiment waiting to happen. The first problem that has to be overcome is creating the stimuli (which is the main non-practical impediment to me doing this). For consistency,...
- 82.1k
8
votes
Is a vowel only writing system possible?
This conlang seems to fit the bill:
The Qohenje writing system is a "reverse abjad" (like the logical opposite of the Arabic or Hebrew writing systems, for example), with the dominant symbols being ...
- 3,102
8
votes
What is the difference between two symbols: /i/ and /ɪ/?
There are three relevant lexical sets here: FLEECE, KIT, and HAPPY. (HAPPY is specifically the last vowel in the word "happy", not the first, since it doesn't appear in monosyllables.)
In ...
- 64k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible