John Vertical wrote:
> Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
>> > and the vowel
>> > system is simply batshit insane: there's EIGHT central vowels alone,
>> > apparently all with contrastive lenght! And here I thought Germanic
>> systems
>> > were byzantine.
>>
>> English aside, what's so byzantine about Germanic vowel systems?
>
>
> Dutch and Danish also spring to mind as fairly complex, and most of the
> others have at least in some dialects some fairly creative
> complications. Standard Swedish and German I find comparatively simple,
> but they're still a notch up from the "standard" /i e a o u/.
And the "standard" /i e a o u/ was the Byzantine inventory of vowels. :-)
--
Ray
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