Re: USAGE: minimum number of vowels?
| From: | Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, July 27, 2004, 19:41 |
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Mark J. Reed jazdI:
> My question: do any languages recognize *fewer* than three vowel
> qualities - two or even just one? If so, which vowel(s) tend(s)
> to be "missing"?
My Linguistic Dictionary (Moscow, 1990) says that some North Caucasian
langs (Abkhaz, Abazin etc.) have only two vowel *phonemes*: low /a/ and
high /@/, but from what I saw in text samples, those are realized as a
good bunch of vowels (5 and more) conditioned by the quality of
surrounding consonants: palatalization, labialization, glottalization
etc.
-- Yitzik
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