Browsing chapter 2 of the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (WALS, Maddieson, 2013), I came across a statement that surprised me. In the sample of 564 languages surveyed in that chapter, only 3 languages contrasts as many as 13 different vowels. What surprised me was that 2 of those languages were German (14 vowels) and…… Continue reading The many vowels of German and English
Month: April 2025
Revisiting Jane’s and my visit
I have posted before about the difficulty of forming a genitive from the co-ordinated phrase Jane and I, for example to talk about a visit by Jane and me. Odd gap in the English genitive – Language Miscellany I reviewed there several ways of trying to do that. I said that I found the following…… Continue reading Revisiting Jane’s and my visit
Sounds of Vietnamese
Vietnamese (tiếng Việt) is in the Vietic subgroup of the Austroasiatic language family. Vietnamese is spoken as a first language by around 85 million people, mainly in Vietnam, where it is the official language. It has several times as many native speakers as all other Austroasiatic languages combined. This post covers: syllable structure word structure consonants vowels reduplication…… Continue reading Sounds of Vietnamese