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Oskar Gudlaugsson sikayal:

See!  I renamed the thread.

> First, the English vowel system. I don't think I've ever written a letter
> on the English vowel system on this list without getting protests :p This
> language is just spoken by so many people in so many ways that it's no use
> referring to the pronunciation of this and that word.
Yeah.  It seems like about once a month that we get into some long
discussion/argument about English phonetics.

> I overreached myself a bit when I made statements regarding Rumanian; I
> wasn't entirely sure, but fired loose anyway, on it having an /M/ phoneme.
> Turns out it's not quite true, but almost; it's /1/, that particular sound
> I was thinking of (the i-circumflex). I try to disclaim my statements as
> much as possible; please don't feel annoyed when I step on your toes with
> falsehoods :)
<<blush>>  Sorry for getting so irritated.

> And then there was the typology question. I have never been well convinced
> by the rather flat-out statements on front-round vowels (which I
> abbreviated "f-r") and back-unround (my abbr. "b-unr") being "highly
> marked" in the world's vowel systems. As I said, with my own knowledge of
> various vowel systems (which I recounted), those sounds wouldn't seem that
> uncommon at all.
Hmmm.  I can't remember which languages you mentioned, but I've heard
that rounded front vowels are virtually unknown outside of the
"Franco-Germanic language area," where they can be seen as a
Sprachbund.  I suppose that
should be expanded to include Hungarian and Turkish (and other
Finno-Ugric languages), but the point remains that any speaker of
European languages would be vastly overexposed to rounded front vowels
on the global scale.

As for unrounded *non-low* back vowels ([A] is pretty common), English has
them, and I hear that they also occur in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean
(?), which suggests that they may be a Sprachbund of East Asia.  At any
rate, in my experience they're even more rare than rounded front vowels.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton

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