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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...