Re: 5-vowel system like Spanish?


On Jan 29, 8:37 am, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<ranjit_math...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote...

Nevertheless, none of the modern Indo-Aryan languages (except Romany)
actually have five vowel phonemes. The minimum is six (/i,e,a,u,o,
O/,
or /i,e,a,@,o,u/). Others have 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, or 13. Hindi and
Punjabi have ten, /i, I, e, &, a, @, u, U, o, O/.

That's close enough to /i/ /i:/ /e:/ /aI/ /a/ /a:/ /u/ /u:/ /o:/ /aU/
- 5 vowels + length + two diphthongs.Yes, historically that's what they are (cf Sanskrit), but both my
references (Masica's "Indo-Aryan Languages" and Comrie's "Major
Languages") claim the phonemization is as I said -- though the "tense"
vowels /i,a,u/ are pronounced longer, length, apparently, isn't the
important distinction. And your two "diphthongs" are generally realised
as monophthongs. Seems rather similar to the situation in late Latin,
eh?

Do you agree with this? (I'm not a Hindi speaker myself, of course!)

I responded to this but my response has mysteriously not appeared. I
don't have time to redo it right now.

The main Dravidian languages do have five, plus length.

Malayalam has /@/ too, albeit phonemic only in a terminal context; in
other contexts, [@] is an allophone of /a/.

My understanding is that it has /&/ too, though probably only in
borrowings from English.

If described using the term code-switching:
When code-switching to the phonology for loan words from English, the
phoneme /A/ has an allophone [&:] and there's no phoneme /&/. Thus, /
bAnk/ and /bAg/ are pronounced as [b&Nk] and [b&g]. As per a recent
thread, English "mass" becomes Malayalam /mAs/ pronounced [mAs] and is
one word that doesn't retain its [&] pronunciation as a consequence of
there not being a phoneme /&/ in Malayalam.

.