john@mplvax.UUCP (John McInerney) (07/14/84)
A friend of mine, a couple of years ago, gave me two English words that had no vowel (aeiouy) in them. I can't remember the words, but I am fairly sure that they both had a "w" in them acting as a vowel. I remember them being Celtic for rolling hills or something... Here is one that Webster's 9th says is not standard English: crwth \kruth\ n [Welsh] (14th century): an ancient Celtic stringed instrument that is plucked or bowed. Anyone know the words or any others. Please mail to me and I will summarize. John McInerney sdcsvax!mplvax!john UUCP mplvax!john@nosc ARPA
donn@utah-cs.UUCP (Donn Seeley) (07/22/84)
From: andyb@dartvax.UUCP (Andy Behrens)
I don't really think it's accurate to say there are words in
English, OR ANY OTHER LANGUAGE, without vowels.
This is certainly false. It should at least be qualified to something
like 'OR ANY OTHER MAJOR WESTERN EUROPEAN LANGUAGE', and even then it's
not clear that it will hold up (see below).
Just for fun, I went to the library and looked up a reference on the
language Bella Coola, which is spoken in the area of the Bella Coola
River in British Columbia. The language is notorious among linguists
for its predilection for clusters and non-vocalic (read: not a vowel)
syllabic nuclei. I sometimes wonder if there are little stands in the
town of Bella Coola where visiting linguists can buy native words for a
few Canadian dollars apiece... but anyway.
Bella Coola is very difficult to transliterate to ASCII but I will make
a small attempt here. A quote after a consonant indicates a
glottalized consonant; a single quote by itself is a glottal stop; a
backquote indicates that the preceding consonant is aspirated; a /q/ is
a voiceless velar consonant, pronounced farther back on the tongue than
a /k/; /x/ is a fricative corresponding to /k/, while /X/ is a
fricative corresponding to /q/ and /x^/ is what is written by an 'x'
with a caret under it, and I don't know for sure what it is (an uvular
fricative? a back affricate?); /S/ is a 'funny' /s/ (no precise
pronunciation was given, although I suspect that the /S/ is
retroflexed); a /L/ is a voiceless lateral (like Welsh 'll'); /c/ is a
dental affricate; /TL/ is a voiceless lateral affricate; a colon /:/
indicates that the previous segment is lengthened; a capitalized vowel
orthography indicates an alternate set of vowels whose precise
characteristics I've forgotten but I believe they are lax variants of
the normal vowels; the digraph /ae/ indicates an 'umlauted' /a/ in the
orthography, and I believe this is pronounced as a front version of
/a/; a segment in parentheses is written as a superscript in the
orthography and indicates a sort of trace segment, lenis and voiceless
and perhaps not always pronounced; and finally I will stick a space
between each segment to make it more obvious where the segments are...
This will at least let you guess at the pronunciations.
Anyway, to the point -- here are a few Bella Coola words with no
vowels in them, taken from the glossary in vol. 2 of THE BELLA
COOLA INDIANS:
/k L p'/ 'white fir(?)'
/p' x`/ 'crabapple'
/q'(w) x L t' n/ 'the noble and rightful sentiments
engendered in both families by an
elaborate marriage ceremony, either
real or fictitious' (I'm NOT making
these up!)
/s` p' s`/ 'Cold Wind (a supernatural being)'
/s t' X`/ 'Rainwater Dripping Through the Roof
(a supernatural being)'
/S x(i) t l`/ 'afterbirth'
You're not likely to get away with these in Scrabble, I guess. To
give you an idea of the rest of the language, here are some words
with vowels in them:
/ae k' p ae d u l t s L p'/
'spruce leaves'
/ae m k' p' t' s/ 'mouse'
/X m X m a t s l/ 'minnows'
/d i + k w t' A m s t s + d i + e m t s/
'niece's husband (4 words)'
/I l q' w l ae s L n ae l o s t I m A x/
'half brother or sister'
/s k' t' s a/ 'a game played with throwing stones'
/S t c q w a s t l u s t k w i/
'Dark Shade (a supernatural being)'
/p' k' i m:/ 'mosquito'
/k' I m s t' x w a l ae x t s t a/
'name of a Bella Coola hunter'
/n u s x w TL' ae m t o m/
'abstinence from acts of an unclean
nature after the taking of a
powerful medicine' (Really!)
/s t' t' l a: X a x s/ 'rapids (in a river)'
/s x^ n x^ n E s ae x s/
'supernatural children guarded by the
hermaphrodite in the land above'
If you are thankful that English is so much simpler, you should
remember that English isn't so easy either. Besides clusters like
'apt' which give Japanese speakers the creepy-crawlies, we have
wonderful words like 'twelfths' and 'sixths'. If you can make the word
'sixths' into a verb and pronounce its past tense ('sixthsed'), you're
well on your way to handling Bella Coola.
If you believe, as I do, that "crwth" is not English but Welsh,
then you need to remind people that "w" IS a vowel in Welsh.
This points up the problems of confusing pronunciation and
orthography. Because English orthography represents English
pronunciation so poorly, it's hard to say that any individual letter in
the alphabet is a 'vowel' in English without knowing what the context
is -- that is to say, what word it occurs in. Debates over words
'without vowels' in English are thus pretty pointless if you don't
require tough ground rules.
If you look at pronunciations, it's clear that English does have words
without vowels. In particular, American English lets certain sonorants
act as syllable nuclei. Some examples are dialectal: /n/ for 'and',
/m/ for 'him' or 'them'. In words like 'full' /fl:/, 'fur' /fr:/,
'curtain' /kr:'tn/ and so on, the historical vowels indicated by the
orthography have simply been swallowed up by the following consonants.
(It helps that English /l/ and /r/ are not like similar sounds in other
languages, since they are almost 'lateral' and 'retroflex' vowels
themselves. But check out Czech sometime for another language that
does this.)
An ex-linguist,
Donn Seeley University of Utah CS Dept donn@utah-cs.arpa
40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W (801) 581-5668 decvax!utah-cs!donn