Diacritics and Vowel Inventories (WAS: Chinese whispers game)

--- On Sat, 2/28/09, Peter Collier <petecollier@...> wrote:

...
> > A luxury you can afford yourself because you are a
> native
> > speaker of the only language using the Latin alphabet
> > which can be correctly written without diacritics,
> > beside Latin itself.
> >
> >
> > /BP 8^)>
>
>
> Correctly written, but perhaps not optimally!
>
> Surely there must be a small language somewhere in the
> Americas or the Pacific that is as diacritically inhibited
> as English? Especially if the authograhy was devised by an
> English speaker.
>
> P.
Some languages just use way too many vowels! ;-)

I've always wanted to do a conlang with only three vowels. An open vowel somewhere
in the general neighborhood of "father" and "fat", (exact location irrelevant),
a somewhat broader vowel in the vicinity of "feet" and "fit", and a somewhat
rounded vowel roughly in the neighborhood of "root" and "rote", again with no
particular preference for exactly which somewhat rounded sound is used.

It seems like {a, i, u} is a plenty large enough inventory of vowels to do an interesting conlang.

In fact, I'll wager an acceptably comprehensible version of English could be
devised using just those three sounds.

--gary

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