Re: CHAT: A Story

Seaman Puddles?  Oy.

I received a similar message from a fellow with the screen name AEIOU who
was creating an artificial language whose phonetic inventory consisted
entirely of vowels.  He intended it for international communication.
Keyboards, he said, could be streamlined if one only needed five letter
keys (!) and furthermore vowels sounded better than consonants and so his
language would be pretty, to boot.

I was very polite.  I just pointed out that vowels tend to be fairly
unstable, particularly when jammed together into a miasmic soup (okay, not
those exact words).  I dont' recall his answer to that.  I don't think he
had one.  As I recall, he didn't seem to know much about linguistics.

I did my best to impart a tiny bit of my miniscule knowledge, but finally
I just wished him luck.  (I didn't even ask what he'd do with people who,
like me, would feel compelled to dipthonginize (anize?  I hate this
language) or insert glides to separate vowels.)

And let's not even get into the aesthetic issue.  *shudders*  All vowels?


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