Re: vowels: are they necessary?

On Wednesday, December 8, 2004, at 12:48 , Stephen Mulraney wrote:

> Steven Williams wrote:
>>  --- # 1 <salut_vous_autre@...> wrote:
[snip]

>>> continued as long we want. Is there any languages
>>> that has some words that are only consonants without
>>> vowels?
>
>
>> Oh, quite a few. Russian comes to mind; 's' and 'v'
>> are both legitimate words (I think they're
>> prepositions).
>
> Well, phonologically, they never stand alone (AFAIK).
> Indeed, another consonental preposition is 'k'.
No they don't stand alone. Although the are written with white space each
side, they are not 'words' in the fullest sense; they are essentially
proclitics.

>
> Many languages have a syllabic 'r' or
>> 'l' (such as Czech, Slovak and Sanskrit).
>
> Or English. (little /litl=/, better /betr=/)
Yes - syllabic /r/ and /l/ are not rare - and syllabic /m/ and /n/ are
common enough in English.

[snip]
>>> Generally, consonant always means that there is
>>> vowel pasted to, but why?
>
> I guess the question is, can a phonological segment (a "sound") act as
> a syllable peak? If so, surely it's operating as a vowel in the language
> in question.
Yes - it is important to distinguish between _phonetic_ and _phonological_
behavior, otherwise confusions sets in; and I think that is happening to
some extent in this thread.

>
>> Generally, most languages have syllabic constraints
>> that forbid isolated consonants without vowels. But
>> then again, many languages break those very same
>> rules; Mandarin, in certain interpretations, has
>> syllabic [s], [s`], [s\], [ts], [ts`], [ts\] and [r\].
>
> I don't think any rules is being broken here, simply because (say) [s]
> comes from the part of the IPA chart labelled "consonants".
Yep.

It is very important to keep phonetic & phonological distinctions separate.
  For that reason the phonetician Kenneth Pike coined the terms _contoid_
and _vocoid_ in order to be able to distinguish between phonetic and
phonological notions of consonant and vowel. He used the former terms for
phonetic distinctions and the latter for phonological distinctions.

PHONETIC
_contoid_ = a a sound produced by complete closure of the vocal tract or
the narrowing of the tract to cause audible friction.

_vocoid_ = a sound lacking any closure or narrowing of of the vocal tract
sufficient to produce audible friction. This means that besides the
classic 'vowels', /r/, /l/, /w/ /j/ and other approximants are vocoids.

PHONOLOGICAL
_consonant_ = a sound which functions at the margins of a syllable.
Therefore, by definition, a (phonological) consonant must be "pasted" to a
vowel.

_vowel_ = a sound which functions as he center or peak of a syllable.

So a sound such as [l] is a vocoid (or 'phonetic vowel') but may be
phonologically either a consonant or a vowel, depending upon the phonology
of a given language.

[snip]
> ObConlang: I once had a conlang idea for a lang that had no "vowels". It
> had
> syllable peaks, of course, but these were mostly fricatives and sonorants.
Phonologically, they are vowels. And to answer the question in the subject
header: Yes, phonologically they are necessary (But those shown as
phonetic vowels on the IPA chart, are not neccessary    :)

Ray
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