Re: the sound [a]

From: "John Cowan" <cowan@...>

> Akhilesh Pillalamarri scripsit:
>
> > Everywhere I've read, it says the sound [a] is the most common sound
> > in human speech; my personal experience with language agrees with
> > that. I wonder now, is the sound [a] found in every language?
>
> Well, some kind of low unrounded vowel is very common.  I personally
> don't have [a] except in a few diphthongs, only [A] and [&].
I don't think [a] exists in either American or British English except
regionally, like the Boston dialect, which replaces [A:] with [a:]. And the
monophthongalized diphthong /ai)/ in Texan and other varieties of Southern
US English is something like [a:], maybe a higher vowel like [6:].

Farsi has [&] and [Q:] for short and long |a|, but not [a]. Many dialects of
Arabic pronounce short and long |a| as [&] except next to emphatics,
uvulars, pharyngeals and |r| (then the vowel is backed to [A] or [V]), and
short |a| word-finally it's [@].

Irish Gaelic I'm not sure about. I think the short and long |a| are more
like [A] or [Q], but might be fronted to [&] after palatized consonants.
Hungarian short |a| is [Q] or [O] or something like that, but long |a| is
definitely [a:].

But in all of those cases low vowels do exist, if not low central vowels. I
do think there's a language somewhere with the phonemic inventory /i e o u/
but not /a/.

Now there are some languages that lack /u/, and Japanese is a famous case.
It has the unrounded counterpart /M/, however. Cree and Obijwe among the
Algonquian languages, Navajo and some others in Athabaskan, and various
other Native American languages also lack /u/. I can't think of any
languages anywhere that don't have /i/ - unless you count Georgian, which
lacks /i/ but instead has /I/, so I honestly don't want to count it.

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