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

On Dec 14, 11:49 pm, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Stefano MAC:GREGOR" <esperant...@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.

Actually eight consonants, thirteen phonemes in all.

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.

And it's worth pointing out that this name (made famous in the song
"My Little Grass Shack") is a highly specific term, for which the
equivalent English expression would be five syllables or more ("pig-
snouted triggerfish", "blackbar triggerfish", "Rhinecanthus
aculeatus"). Two syllables (CVCV) is typical for basic lexical
morphemes.

Ross Clark
.

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