Re: persian and semitic

From: Miguel Carrasquer (mcv_at_wxs.nl)
Date: 02/26/05 

Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 12:33:56 GMT

On Sat, 26 Feb 2005 03:12:08 GMT, "John Atkinson"
<johnacko@bigpond.com> wrote:

>Kabard and other Circassian languages (NW Caucasian) have three levels of
>vowel height, but no contrast of front-back, rounded-unrounded, or length.
>(Some other NW Caucasian languages seem to have only two vowels.)

/@/ and /a/. The abundance of palatalized and labialized
and even labio-palatalized consonants in NW Caucasian
suggests that we're dealing with either a "degenerate"
3-vowel system (*i and *u passed their front-/backness on to
neighbouring consonants, and merged as /@/, while /a/
remained unchanged) or a 6-vowel system (*i, *i: and *u, *u:
labialized/palatalized neighbouring consonants, all short
vowels merged to /@/, and all long ones to /a/). If the
second analysis is correct, it would allow or the
possibility of 1-vowel languages (*/a/ > /@/, */i/ > /@/ +
pal., */u/ > /@/ +lab.).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@wxs.nl

Relevant Pages

  • Re: persian and semitic
    ... >>(Some other NW Caucasian languages seem to have only two vowels.) ... > and even labio-palatalized consonants in NW Caucasian ... With the Arandic languages Kaytetj and the western dialect of Anmatjirra ... Some workers used to analyse some NW Caucasian languages as having only one ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: The Scream
    ... pronounce all consonants as sh or y ... ??>> attempt to speak Russian Polish: ... ignore most of the letters, whether they be vowels ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: The Scream
    ... pronounce all consonants as sh or y ... ??>> attempt to speak Russian Polish: ... ignore most of the letters, whether they be vowels ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: India free education bill tabled
    ... to distinguish consonants and long/short vowels. ... Lot of Sanskrit got printed that way. ... languages in one sentence, ...
    (soc.culture.indian)
  • Re: Delphi Student and Vowel Extraction Program
    ... >to extract the Vowels and Consonants from and edit box, ... and the consonants into a 3rd edit box. ... Quite a lot of characters that might turn up in a string are neither ... and different character sets. ...
    (alt.comp.lang.borland-delphi)