Xref: utzoo comp.fonts:2548 soc.culture.german:4370 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!udel!princeton!phoenix!rcharman From: rcharman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Robert Craig Harman) Newsgroups: comp.fonts,soc.culture.german Subject: Re: Umlaute [was: naive (...question about uncial...) ] Message-ID: <9864@idunno.Princeton.EDU> Date: 23 May 91 00:57:25 GMT References: <1991Apr24.152455.22367@engage.enet.dec.com> <1991May22.141034.12747@pbs.org> Sender: news@idunno.Princeton.EDU Followup-To: comp.fonts Organization: Princeton University Lines: 34 In <1991May22.141034.12747@pbs.org> btiffany@pbs.org writes: >In tmb@ai.mit.edu (T M Breuel) writes: >> In any case, I believe most dialects of English already have more >> vowels than any of the languages you mention (certainly more than >> Spanish). English has somewhere around 14 vowels. > >FOURTEEN? Well, when I was knee high from the floor in school they taught me >only FIVE: A E I O and U! It was mentioned that sometimes Y can act like >a vowel, but it is still a consonant. So at most you might say English has >5.5 vowels. But 14?? Where did you come up with such a figure? Fourteen vowel sounds, I believe he means; those being: ah in father/hot a in cat aw in bought/draw ai in pain/may eh in net/send ee in field/seal ih in bit/kill ie in pie/type o in hope/coal u in put/book oo in boot/cool uh in cut/bluff ow in dowel/scow @ in pencil (pen-s@l)/woman (wu m@n) [the schwa sound] These each have stressed and unstressed variants (e.g., "sigh" vs. "type"), as well as variations before "l" and "r", but, by and large, 14 is pretty accurate. craig no .sig go .fig