Re: Why Consonants?

On 17/02/07, Alex Fink <a4pq1injbok_0@...> wrote:

> Hah, never mind a speaker of Berber (/tftktstt/ 'you sprained it'), or
> Salishan (/xKp_>X_wKtK)pKKs/ 'he had had in his possession a bunchberry
> plant').
>
> I can't think of any natlang that goes to these lengths with all-vowel words
> longer than about four or five.  So is the situation reversed at the extremes?
Well, there's words like "kīlauea" in Hawaiian with his longer if you
count the /l/ as vowel-like and much longer if you count the ī as two
vowels; "Hawaiian" in English has a good long string of vowel-like
segments too.

I'm also of the understanding that the Berber, at least, has
epenthetic vowels. Presumably not much more than the [@] I put in the
above, but spread liberally they could significantly increase the
comfort :)

I suspect the extremes in either direction are relatively rare but I
don't know...

> >> This came up on the list some time ago, and someone observed that the
> >> opposite is true for Spanish: Vowels are (apparently) pronounced quite
> >> consistently between dialects, which are distinguished largely on the
> >> basis of consonants (pronounciation of frex ll, j, z, -s).
> >[...]
> >
> >Interesting, I didn't know this before. I wonder what causes some
> >languages to change vowels faster than consonants, or vice versa.
>
> I'd imagine that has something to do with the fact that Spanish has a nice
> stable cross-linguistically favored five vowel system, whereas the English
> system has crammed in entirely too many vowels for its own good.
Actually, makes me wonder, aside from the addition of a handful of
diphthongs and the loss of a back unrounded vowel *ɨ, the Finnish
vowel system looks like it's been relatively stable since
Proto-Uralic/Proto-Finno-Ugric (at least, they both have/had more than
their fair share, in essentially the same ways). Anyone know if this
is just a deceptive superficial appearance, or is it so?

--
Tristan.