Re: OT: Icelandic help
| From: | Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, May 9, 2008, 14:32 |
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Den 5. mai. 2008 kl. 21.24 skreiv David J. Peterson:
>
> In fact, there have been studies on
> the speech rate of various languages, and some languages are
> spoken more quickly than others (Japanese is one of the quickest,
> and American English is pretty slow).
Some of the quickest languages I know are without stress. I wonder
how general this is.
It strikes me as probable as well that quick languages may lose some
of the distiction between long and short vowels, and would tend to
simplify diphthongs. I've had Urianian go through one or two such
phases. For example, thw vowel shifts in highland Urianian are the
same for long and short vowels, while in lowland Urianian, long and
short vowels are shifted differently. This suggests that highland
Urianian has lost at least some of the long/short distinction before
the vowel shifts.
LEF
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