Are your conlangs actually meant to be somehow spoken by birds, or are they in some way...bird-inspired? Just out of curiosity.Birdlang wrote:My conlang Swampsparrownese has 15 vowels, and it is written in Cyrillic.it has /i e æ/ /u ɯ o ɤ ɑ ɒ/ /ɨ ʉ ɘ ɵ a ɶ/. Know any similar vowel sets?
Don't Cree and Aleut have length contrasts?zompist wrote:Sure— Quechua, Cree, Moroccan Arabic, Aleut...Porphyrogenitos wrote:While this thread is active again - are there any languages with just a plain /a i u/ vowel system, but without any length contrast?
You may be right. I took those from Lass's Phonology, and he contrasts length in other vowel system, so I assumed he was representing them correctly. But Wikipedia seems to disagree.Nortaneous wrote:Don't Cree and Aleut have length contrasts?zompist wrote:Sure— Quechua, Cree, Moroccan Arabic, Aleut...Porphyrogenitos wrote:While this thread is active again - are there any languages with just a plain /a i u/ vowel system, but without any length contrast?
Earlier old West Norse had <ę æ a á ǫ ǫ́> which were /æ æ: a a: ɒ ɒ:/ but I don't think anybody's crazier. It was an unstable system, with /æ/ soon merging with /e/ and /ɒ:/ with /a:/ (hvęr > hver, spǫ́ > spá).vokzhen wrote: Distinguishing /ɑ ɒ/ without length differences is pretty rare, and even rarer is a three-way contrast between /æ a ɑ/. I'm not sure a four-way between /æ a ɑ ɒ/ even exists, and if it did there'd almost certainly other things going on (e.g. /æ/ is really [ɛ] and /ɑ/ is [ɑ:]).
Lower Konda Mansi is claimed to have had /æ æː ɶ ɶː a aː ɒ/.Herr Dunkel wrote:Earlier old West Norse had <ę æ a á ǫ ǫ́> which were /æ æ: a a: ɒ ɒ:/ but I don't think anybody's crazier. It was an unstable system, with /æ/ soon merging with /e/ and /ɒ:/ with /a:/ (hvęr > hver, spǫ́ > spá).vokzhen wrote: Distinguishing /ɑ ɒ/ without length differences is pretty rare, and even rarer is a three-way contrast between /æ a ɑ/. I'm not sure a four-way between /æ a ɑ ɒ/ even exists, and if it did there'd almost certainly other things going on (e.g. /æ/ is really [ɛ] and /ɑ/ is [ɑ:]).
Pardon for necroing, but Yapese does this, also: it has ejectives and it's spoken on an island.Radius Solis wrote:I don't, and it breaks a universal. Of course not all "universals" are truly universal, but as far as I can remember I've never heard of this one being broken in a natural language: that, disregarding schwa, no height row on the chart has a greater number of distinct vowels than the row above it. (Edit: except in Germanic. But there it's probably licensed by the large number of vowels - things get more free when that happens.)clawgrip wrote:Do you know of any natural languages with this system?Code: Select all
i u e ø ə o a
Also /ø/ is virtually never found without /y/ - which follows from the universal, unless there's some other gap in its row. But that isn't the case here.
Still, it's not a fatal flaw or anything. I could certainly see a language arriving at that vowel set by perfectly normal sound changes. I just wouldn't be very confident that the /ø/ would stay stable for long.