man it’s fucked up how plosive consonants can’t exist without a vowel sound
like they’re not even really a consonant
there is no b or p, you just add “b-ness” or “p-ness” to a vowel. it is a p aspected a.
can anyone hear me????
Yes
I remember thinking about this since I was a little kid. About how you can go “mmmmmm” or “nnnn” or “ssssss” for as long as your lungs hold out, without ever making a vowel sound, but you can’t go “bbbbbb” or “pppppp” it just isn’t possible. Super frustrating to my child mind lol.
Also remember being frustrated that you can’t pronounce some vowel sounds as one syllable. The example I always got hung up on was the “i” in the word “crocodile.”
The ending always came out pronounced like “dial” (two vowel sounds, two syllables) and it didn’t make sense to me. Like, I could make it sound like one syllable if I changed the final consonant (croco-dime). Or if I added something after it (croco-di-la). But somehow the combination of the I having 1. an L after it and 2. nothing after that, made it sound like a double vowel, it pissed me off
i’m not a super linguistics nerd, more of a lapsed fan, so i don’t super get the distinction between phonemic and phonetic notations, but i actually hear 3 vowel sounds in the i in crocodile.
or at least 2+a semivowel
da-y(I)-ul
whereas most “long i” s like time are only two–taIm.
clearly a schwa added in -dile where there isn’t in time.
Oh yeah definitely, the long I is itself made up of two sounds (which I didn’t think of in childhood, but I’ve thought about it a lot more recently when trying to make conlangs. Also the consonants that are two different sounds, like Q and X).
I like languages that spell that sort of stuff the way it is.
German kinda does this with the vowels, because in German it’s I before E when the sound is long-e, and E before I when the sound is long-I.
Which means there’s an important difference between Wiener (someone or something from Vienna, like Vienna schnitzel or Vienna sausage) and Weiner (someone who makes wine, or someone who cries.)
(lol, German sorta preserves the wine/whine pun, even though it differentiates wiener spellings that I barely ever see an English speaker care about)