Re: Why Consonants?

On Fri, 16 Feb 2007 16:27:14 -0800, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...> wrote:

>On Sat, Feb 17, 2007 at 09:56:56AM +1100, T. A. McLeay wrote:
> With a vowel, you have to more carefully position your tongue lest you
>> say /e/ instead of /&#201;&#170;/ or whatever close pair your language has. Also,
>> a stream of vowels with a few consonants added in is a lot more
>> comfortable to say that a stream of consonants with a few vowels...
>> try saying a sentence-worth of words like [ptps@k@n] :)
>
>Try telling that to, e.g., a Czech speaker... ;-)
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?

>> >Vowels are more prone to change. Well, at least for most of the
>> >languages I 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.

Alex

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