🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1991May22.141034.12747@pbs.org> btiffany@pbs.org writes:
>In <TMB.91May22102757@volterra.ai.mit.edu> tmb@ai.mit.edu (T M Breuel) writes:
>> In any case, I believe most dialects of English already have more
>> vowels than any of the languages you mention (certainly more than
>> Spanish). English has somewhere around 14 vowels.
>
>FOURTEEN?  Well, when I was knee high from the floor in school they taught me
>only FIVE:  A E I O and U!  It was mentioned that sometimes Y can act like
>a vowel, but it is still a consonant.  So at most you might say English has
>5.5 vowels.  But 14??  Where did you come up with such a figure?

Fourteen vowel sounds, I believe he means; those being:

ah in father/hot
a  in cat
aw in bought/draw
ai in pain/may
eh in net/send
ee in field/seal
ih in bit/kill
ie in pie/type
o  in hope/coal
u  in put/book
oo in boot/cool
uh in cut/bluff
ow in dowel/scow
@  in pencil (pen-s@l)/woman (wu m@n)  [the schwa sound]

These each have stressed and unstressed variants (e.g., "sigh" vs. "type"), as
well as variations before "l" and "r", but, by and large, 14 is pretty accurate.

							  craig
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