Re: Latin vowels?

From: Patrick Andries (pandries@iti.qc.ca)
Date: Mon Sep 09 2002 - 12:31:15 EDT


De: "Marco Cimarosti" <marco.cimarosti@essetre.it>
>
> Mark Davis wrote:
> > I need to get a list of Latin characters that are generally considered
> > vowels. I partitioned the characters as in the list below, but there
> > are lots of oddball ones for which I can only guess (LATIN CAPITAL
> > LETTER OU? LATIN LETTER WYNN?...).
> >
> > http://www.macchiato.com/unicode/latin_vowels.html
>
> Er... Is something I should feel guilty about?
>
> Anyway, here are a few comments:
>
> 2. List "Vowels" - ambiguous letters that can be consonants:
> U+0049 # (I) LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I
> U+0069 # (i) LATIN SMALL LETTER I
> U+0075 # (u) LATIN SMALL LETTER U
> U+FF29 # (I) FULLWIDTH LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I
> U+FF49 # (i) FULLWIDTH LATIN SMALL LETTER I
> U+FF55 # (u) FULLWIDTH LATIN SMALL LETTER U
> I would treat all these as vowels, although I know a few rare exceptions:
> - In Latin, i and u were also used to represent consonants /j/ and /v/
> (originally, /w/). This ambiguity is still partly present in modern
> languages, especially for i.

Is very present in modern languages (but again : what do you do with glides or approximants, called semi-vowels or semi-consonants in some languages, are they consonants, vowels or a third kind?).

I is a vowel or a glide in French (and English). Pied = [pje] (see onion in English), but pis = [pi], l (el) is also sometimes a glide (fille = [fij])... U in certain contexts is a glide : nuit [nɥi], muet [mɥƐ].

But it is true that I and U are generally considered vowels in all languages I know of. Y is really an ambiguous case, if glides are considered as consonants.

> - W and Y with typical vowel diacritics are almost certainly vowels.

I insist on the w^ in Chichewa which is, I believe, a consonant : a bilabial fricative.
w¨ is also used (Straka) to represent a ɥ glide nuit = nw¨i (if glides are consonants, then w¨ is at least in this tarnscription a consonants).

> 4. List "Nonvowels" - ambiguous letters that are probably vowels:
> U+1E36 # (Ḷ) LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH DOT BELOW

This is used (only ?) to transcribe a retroflex lateral approximant ("semi-vowel/semi-consonant") as in U+0933 lla (ळ).

P. A



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