Re: If you were to design a language, how many vowels and consonants would you use?


"Stefano MAC:GREGOR" <esperantujo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote...
Je 6 dec 2007 1840, "H.K. Kingston-Smith" <HK...@xxxxxxxxx> prenis
sian klavaron en la mano kaj skribis:

I am talking about vowel and consonant sounds, and I am
assuming that the purpose of the language is communication
between people with different native languages.

One idea uptopic was to use only those vowels and consonants common to
all languages, which would give you approximately one vowel and three
consonants.

It would give you zero vowels and zero consonants. There was a thread here about a year ago in which it was established that there is no consonant or vowel that exists in every one of the world's languages.

That would mean that words would be inconveniently long, worse than
Hawai`ian "humuhumunukunukuapuaa", and it has five vowels and thirteen
consonants.

German and Welsh, both of which are notorious for their long words, have lots more vowels and consonants than that. I suspect there's little if any correlation between length of words and phoneme number across languages.

Of course, if you really wanted to do the statistics, you'd have resolve the problem of just what a "word" is -- which isn't possible.

For example, the only reason your Hawai`ian word isn't written as four words, viz "humuhumu nukunuku a pua`a" (= triggerfish (with) snout of pig) is orthographic convention. In other Polynesian languages, similar constructions usually aren't run together.

New sounds and combinations of sounds can be learned, so Spanish
speakers can learn to say "hamburger" and "Spanish", and English
speakers can learn to say "Übermorgen", "lachen".

Perhaps they can, but most adult learners don't bother. They get by fine using approximations that use sounds and sound combinations that occur in their native language -- like [ambaQa] and [espanis], [u:b@mO:g@n] and [la:k@n]

John.

.

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