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From: neal@druhi.UUCP (Neal D. McBurnett)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Easy languages (number of vowels: English vs. Esperanto)
Message-ID: <77@druhi.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 27-Dec-85 12:35:09 EST
Article-I.D.: druhi.77
Posted: Fri Dec 27 12:35:09 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 28-Dec-85 01:47:11 EST
References: <1791@uwmacc.UUCP> <839@h-sc1.UUCP> <1809@uwmacc.UUCP> <842@h-sc1.UUCP> <418@bcsaic.UUCP>, <718@sparRe: Easy languages
Organization: AT&T Information Systems Laboratories, Denver
Lines: 19

> English has 7 vowels and 7 diphthongs

There are certainly many ways of counting, but I think it is closer
to 12 vowels and 8 diphthongs, at least with my accent:
	bean, bin, Ben, ban, bun, barn, Bonn, born, burn, boon, good, banana
	say, no, fly, how, fear, care, poor.

At some Esperanto conferences in Germany and Hungary last summer, I had
very little difficulty with the variations in Esperanto accent among
speakers from, e.g., France, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and China.
The letter with the most variation was "r".

I had much more difficulty with the variation in English accent
among English speakers from England, Austrialia and the southern US.
I attribute this mostly to the relative simplicity of the vowel system in
Esperanto (which has the same five vowels as Spanish, Serbo-Croatian,
Japanese, and many other languages).

-Neal McBurnett, ihnp4!druny!neal