Re: A "minimalist" phonology...

At 8:26 pm -0700 21/4/01, Danny Wier wrote:
[snip]
>
>Oskar suggested that, and since Japanese u has a tendency to disappear,
>a-e-i-o would work fine. (Isn't that the basic vowel system of Navajo
Dunno about Navajo, but it appears to be the basic vowel system of
"Lemnian" - a non-Greek language found on a stele from Lemnos (the language
has also been called 'Tyrrhenian' [from the Greek for 'Etruscan'] and
'Pelasgian', but as the latter was the name coined for a putative
Indo-European language by those who championed the theory of a pre-Greek
IE-lang in the Aegean area, it is liable to be misunderstood).

The language itself, whatever its true name, displays remarkable affinities
with what we know of Etruscan, which also had a four-vowel system, namely:
a-e-i-u.  That is, both Etruscan & Lemnian had two front vowels, a low
central vowel, and only one back vowel.

We often present vowels in diagrams such as squares, trapezoids
(US)/trapeziums (Brit)* or triangles which suggest perfect symmetry in the
mouth with as much space for front vowels as for back vowels.  In fact this
is not so: the back vowels have less space, which is why if there is
asymmetry, there are likely to be fewer back vowels than front vowels.

*according to my dictionary, a quadrilateral with:
                                        UK         US
- only one pair of sides parallel - trapezium   trapezoid
-        no sides parallel at all - trapezoid   trapezium

Weird.

Ray.



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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
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