Re: More Ere:tas: The fable of the North Wind and the Sun

En réponse à Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...>:

>
> I really must get a proper grasp of how to do vowels properly in IPA.
> The vowels are roughly (and I'm not sure this is entirely correct or
> even realistic as far as vowel systems go):
>
> a = /@/
> o = /u:/
> e = /E/
> ä = /e:/
> ö = /o:/
> ë = /i:/
>
No /a/? Although Proto-Indo-European is reconstructed without /a/ (it is
reconstructed with a single vowel which can be /e/, /o/ or null, depending on
grammatical and semantic features, but of course nobody can really tell what
the actual phonetic content was, if it really existed), no language in the
world that we know of seems to lack this vowel. Even some Caucasian languages
which can be argued to have only two vowels have /a/ and /@/. But of course,
among all the languages that were lost without us knowing anything about them,
maybe there were some lacking an /a/. We can never be sure of anything :) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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