Timeline for Are there languages with more vowels than consonants?
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25 events
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| May 2, 2023 at 22:18 | comment | added | nearsighted | Let us continue this discussion in chat. | |
| May 2, 2023 at 22:18 | comment | added | nearsighted | @JanusBahsJacquet (fyi, Janus, this argument is still going) Biblasia: the IPA represents quite nicely all of the complicated tones of the Tai-Kadai, Sino-Tibetan, and other tonal Asian families. But getting back to the point of our discussion, it seems all Franco did was try to force people to pronounce /s/ as /θ/. That's not a significant change, and amounts only to forcing people to speak in a certain dialect ─ not as extreme as your Thai example above. | |
| May 2, 2023 at 21:50 | comment | added | Biblasia | @nearsighted I have studied IPA at a master's degree level, and I do not like the system. It poorly represents, or even lacks, many of the phonemes that I deal with on a day-to-day basis in the Asian languages, and seems much better suited to the more traditional European language family. In any case, I avoid using IPA to avoid these weaknesses. If only there were a better system....but alas, one cannot even well hear a sound, much less pronounce or represent with a symbol, that he or she did not learn in early childhood. | |
| May 2, 2023 at 18:06 | comment | added | nearsighted | @Biblasia So all he did was try to force some people to pronounce /s/ as /θ/? (By the way, there's no need to have the English approximations for the Thai vowels in your post. We've all studied linguistics here; the IPA would work much better.) | |
| May 1, 2023 at 22:44 | comment | added | Biblasia | @nearsighted Franco prohibited the local dialects from being used. Effectively, this meant that, for example, Valenciano (the dialect of the region of Valencia) could not be used in legal documents or public venues. The same would be true for each of Spain's other regions, e.g. Madrileño for Madrid, Andaluciano for Andalucia, etc. In Andalucia, the "ceta" (C) is pronounced as "S" whereas in other parts of Spain it is pronounced as "TH"--how this was affected during Franco's time I do not know, but it's almost like a lisp--the Andalucians seem unable to pronounce the "TH". | |
| May 1, 2023 at 19:00 | comment | added | nearsighted | @Biblasia Please give an example of a linguistic policy that Franco enacted other than making Spanish the only official language. | |
| May 1, 2023 at 18:50 | comment | added | Biblasia | @nearsighted I studied some of this history, in Spanish, while in Spain, but that was decades ago. I remember clearly that the people chafed at the policies, and when Franco was gone, the local dialects again emerged. But those policies did affect the language in lasting manner. | |
| May 1, 2023 at 18:28 | comment | added | nearsighted | @Biblasia All Franco did was ban the usage of languages other than Spanish, including in names. There is no record, among the scant details offered (which, as Wikipedia helpfully notes right at the top of the article, have multiple issues), of any change to the vocabulary or grammar. And not everyone would obey, anyway. | |
| May 1, 2023 at 5:49 | comment | added | Biblasia | @nearsighted Not just pronunciation, but vocabulary/language itself has been changed by governments. Consider Franco's regime in Spain, per the scant details offered via Wikipedia. There is much more to that story, as the older generation in Spain might still remember. | |
| Apr 30, 2023 at 16:25 | comment | added | nearsighted | @Biblasia I can't believe that anyone would believe that government officials would have the ability to consciously change the language's pronunciation. Spelling, yes, but not pronunciation. | |
| Apr 24, 2023 at 17:03 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | If you’d read and understood my comments, you would know that I did catch that, yes. But it’s clear you’re not understanding anything that I’m saying, despite my attempts to make it as clear as possible, so I’ll not try any further. I’ll just say that this statement from your answer is incorrect: “officials have "simplified" the language, converting the "r" to either an "h" or an "l" in pronunciation”. | |
| Apr 24, 2023 at 15:21 | comment | added | Biblasia | @JanusBahsJacquet Where are you getting your information? Did you catch that fact I mentioned earlier that in the case of "borisut" there was a spelling change? You seem not to have followed that one. I assume Lao is not one of your languages. Until you have an intimate knowledge of Laos, it is likely you will place undue confidence in English-language sources for information on this subject. The only spelling reform on the "r" was the removal of one of them--the other remained. The removed "r" has been reintroduced. Many Lao words have dual spellings (with/without "r" and/or combined "h"). | |
| Apr 24, 2023 at 15:00 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | → It wasn’t until a long time after that that the spelling reform you mentioned above took place, seeking to get rid of this complication by just writing words as they are pronounced. The reform you mention changed the letters, but the sounds had already changed much earlier. | |
| Apr 24, 2023 at 15:00 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | → The letter ຮ (a variation of ຣ) was probably invented while that change was happening, perhaps to denote the difference between [r] and [r̥]. Some time later (no one knows exactly when, but definitely no later than the late 19th or early 20th century), the remaining instances of /r/, such as in borisut, started being pronounced as [l], merging with the previously distinct phoneme /l/. When that happened, Lao no longer had any [r] sounds at all, but the words were still written with the original letters, so you could see whether a word had originally contained an /r/ or not. → | |
| Apr 24, 2023 at 15:00 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @Biblasia I know they exist, and that they’re not pronounced with a [r] sound. But they were not pronounced with [r] before the alphabet reduction you mention either. Officials didn’t suddenly tell everyone in Laos, “You cannot pronounce the sound [r] anymore – from now on, you have to pronounce it as either [h] or [l]”. That did not happen. What happened was that, about 500 years ago, in word-initial position, the original /r/ phoneme (written ຣ) naturally started to be pronounced first as unvoiced [r̥], then later on as [h]; i.e., it merged with the previously distinct phoneme /h/. → | |
| Apr 24, 2023 at 14:16 | comment | added | Biblasia | @JanusBahsJacquet I speak, read, and write Lao. I can assure you that the spellings with the "r" very much exist. However, it is not pronounced as an "r". If one says "โรงเรียน/rongrien" (school) in Thai, the "r" is like the rolled "r" of Spanish. But if one speaks this word in Lao, it (ໂຮງຮຽນ) is pronounced as "honghien." However, in "borisut" (pure), the "r" becomes an "l", i.e. "bolisut." This is reflected in the spelling (Lao: ບໍລິສຸດ vs. Thai: บริสุทธิ์). Lao actually has two "r" characters (ຮ/ຣ), in addition to characters for "l" (ລ) and for "h" (ຫ). They just aren't pronounced. | |
| Apr 24, 2023 at 14:05 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @Biblasia As Tony mentioned, this was a change in writing, not in speaking. The /r/ sound (note the /phoneme slashes/, rather than ⟨grapheme brackets⟩) had disappeared much earlier, and reforming the alphabet was just a way to catch up with the existing change in pronunciation. Spelling reforms like that are common, but they don’t affect the inventory of actual sounds used in the language. | |
| Apr 24, 2023 at 13:31 | comment | added | Biblasia | @BeBraveBeLikeUkraine From an outsider's perspective, you make a valid point. From within the language, however, those consonant clusters are treated as combinations of separate phonemes, not new phonemes. For example, the "ng" and "ch" are distinct and indivisible phonemes, but something like "kr" is divisible into its "k" and "r" components--which is why I do not count "kr" as its own consonant. | |
| Apr 24, 2023 at 13:24 | comment | added | Biblasia | @TonyK I should also note that in addition to simplifying the Lao script, one of the purposes of the king was political in nature. He deliberately wanted the Lao language to be different from Thai, hence the removal of certain consonants, and pressure placed on the population to adopt the revised pronunciations. | |
| Apr 24, 2023 at 13:24 | comment | added | Be Brave Be Like Ukraine |
While this answer contains a good insight, it "unfairly" favors vowels over consonants. Namely, it promotes vowel clusters (like ia and ua) into full-featured vowel sounds while discourages consonant clusters (like kr, khr, kl, khl, kw) at all. It promotes vowel duration (thus promoting a and a: into two full-featured ones) but discourages the final values of many consonants (e.g. written/initial r becoming final n) etc. Thankfully, it did not consider lexical tones; that would multiply the whole multitude of vowels by 5.
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| Apr 24, 2023 at 13:22 | comment | added | TonyK | @Biblasia: that sounds more like a spelling reform than a language reform. It didn't change the language, just the way it was written. | |
| Apr 24, 2023 at 13:20 | comment | added | Biblasia | @JanusBahsJacquet I could be more specific, actually. It was a recent king of Laos, just prior to Communism taking over in the country, who reduced the alphabet and removed certain consonants from it, including the "r". I have spoken with native Lao people, within Laos, who explained this--note that Wikipedia does not appear to have the full details, but a brief mention of the fact that the "r" "was dropped as part of a language reform" can be seen HERE. | |
| Apr 24, 2023 at 12:38 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | “Officials” didn’t “simplify the language” to convert /r/ to /h/ or /l/; that’s not how sound change works. The change happened naturally and gradually in regular speech, not because any officials decreed that it should happen: /r/ became /h/ initially in monosyllabic words and /l/ elsewhere. It’s not known when exactly the latter change happened (though it had definitely happened by the early 20th century), but the change to /h/ seems to have happened around 500 years ago. | |
| S Apr 24, 2023 at 7:48 | review | First answers | |||
| Apr 24, 2023 at 13:12 | |||||
| S Apr 24, 2023 at 7:48 | history | answered | Biblasia | CC BY-SA 4.0 |