Re: tlhn'ks't, ngghlyam'ft, and other scary words
| From: | Danny Wier <dawier@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, February 5, 2003, 12:56 |
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D: "daniel andreasson" <danielandreasson@...>
| Does anyone have a similar list of languages with the
| most vowels? I know about that site which describes
| different vowel systems, and it ranks Swedish among
| the highest with like 19 vowels (even though phonemically
| it's just nine). Surely there must be languages with
| more vowels than that? Or do you have to resort to long/
| short/overlong, nasalized, pharyngealization, et al. to
| beat that?
If you're talking about vowel qualities, disregarding
length/nasality/laryngealization, I read somewhere that German and Norwegian
have 18 or so, more than any other language studied in UPSID. In this book I
have (and some of this I'm guessing), I see listed for the Germanic languages:
German: i I e E y Y o/ oe @ a u U o O o A (16 total)
Dutch: i I e E y o/ oe @ a u o O A (13)
Danish-Norwegian-Swedish: i I e E ae y Y o/ oe (OE) @ a u U o O Q A (17 or 18)
Outside of Germanic, some languages to note:
Hindi: i I e ae (rI) @ a u U o O (10 or 11)
Hungarian: i e (E) ae y o/ a u o Q (10 or 11)
Hebrew: i I e E @ a u U o O A (11)
Vietnamese: i e E ae a M G V u o O (11) *what's SAMPA for "baby gamma"?
Korean: i e ae y o/ 1 @ a u o (10)
Hindi and Hebrew are different in that they don't have an "Umlaut"-type system
of fronting and backing.
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