F. Gregorio de Stafford: (sorry!)
> > It is??nt hard for me to imagine. I am studying Spanish and teaching
> > English now, both of which use (mostly) the same characters. Yet Spanish
> > has five vowel sounds, and English has something like 14 vowel sounds.
Antonio Alvarez del Cuvillo:
> In fact spanish has five vowel sounds, althought it is said that we,
> 'andalusians' have ten vowel sounds (with the same characters a-e-i-o-u).
> This is one of the reasons for that sometimes, other spaniards can't
> understand our dialect.
Hrm, vague enough on my Spanish vowels as to be somewhat unclear as to how we're counting, here. If we're not counting length (as I assume we must not, to get Spanish down to 5), then English has fewer than 14 if you count only "pure" vowels, and more if you count diphthongs. (By the OED's count, 11 and 20 respectively, for "RP" English.)
Mind you, YdialectMV. (And yer man did say 'something like', so maybe I'm being over-picky. I don't think English has an unusually large number of vowel-sounds by the standards of Indo-European languages
Julian Lord:
> Anyway, it's very difficult to apply modern linguistics to this
> problem without assuming the existence of such an ur-language, because
> one of the very foundations of linguistics is that all speech evolved
> from a single root.
Hrm. Last I heard even Nostratic was regarded as an interesting hypothesis, but somewhere between "unproven" and "unprovable". I'm not aware of any such assumption about *all* language being widespread among linguists, much less it being the 'foundation' of anything. What'd "go wrong" in linguistics if this were falsified? Functionally nothing, surely.
Cheers,
Alex.
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