Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site fisher.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!princeton!astrovax!fisher!levy From: levy@fisher.UUCP (Silvio Levy) Newsgroups: net.nlang Subject: Re: Words without vowels? Message-ID: <240@fisher.UUCP> Date: Fri, 27-Jul-84 17:32:10 EDT Article-I.D.: fisher.240 Posted: Fri Jul 27 17:32:10 1984 Date-Received: Sun, 29-Jul-84 03:42:38 EDT References: <3009@rabbit.UUCP>, <3871@fortune.UUCP> <3875@fortune.UUCP> Organization: Princeton Univ. Statistics Lines: 34 I forget which major linguist (but I think it was Saussure) did away with the vowel/consonant dichotomy (an inheritance from Latin and Greek grammar), and proposed instead that sounds be classified along a continuum in what concerns "fluidity". At one extreme would be real vowels (like a in hat), at the other obstruents (consonants like p, t). If you label the continuum 1 through 7, as he did, you can classify fricatives (s, f) -- which, incidentally, satisfy the condition that they can be pronounced for as long as one likes -- under 6, liquids (l, r) under 5, syllabic m, n (not found in English, but similar to nn in manner or tt in matter) under 4, semivowels (y in yes, w in we) under 3, and certain "vowels" like ir in fir under 2. The same sound can have different degrees of vowelness (obstruction to the pas- sage of air). In German "brennend", for example, we have (after bre) a con- sonantal n (7), then a syllabic n (4), then another consonantal n and finally a t. The "e" is not pronounced, but the syllabic n plays the role of a vowel. In Sanskrit and many of its extant daughters l, r, m, n are as common as vowels as they are as consonants (and, taken together, commoner than any of the normal vowels). Under this scheme, what can be said in general about possible and impossible combinations? It seems plausible that one must have some sound of type 6 or below in any given utterance -- if only because air must be expelled from the lungs. However, other than that, very little seems to be verifiable in general. For example, as has been pointed out, slavic languages have lots of consonantal clusters and even some consonant-only words; in fact, Czech has whole sentences without any vowel at all -- under the classification above, the lowest number assigned to a sound would be 5. Complicated clusters with sounds of type 6 and 7 only are common -- ex. Russian k skvazhine, where the s between the two k will form a syllable, simply by virtue of being a 6 between two 7's (still according to Saussure, a syllable is formed when there is a local minimum in the pattern). So just because English is an unimagivative language, let's not generalize and say no language can have vowelless words...