🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9864@idunno.Princeton.EDU>,
	rcharman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Robert Craig Harman) writes:
> 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:
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^
> [...]
>
>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.

OK, five vowels and 14 vowel sounds.

But if you're talking about the sounds vowels make, rather than the vowels
themselves, I can't believe there are only 14.  There must be many, many more.
Maybe Peter Jennings uses only 14, but if you go to Maine, and then to
the Appalachians of southwestern Virginia and eastern Kentucky, and then to
Upstate New York (where they have a pretty unique way of pronouncing the sound
made in words like "about" and "boat"), and then to Georgia and Alabama, you'll
compile a lot more than 14 sounds!  Our five vowels truly have many talents!

But there are 5 vowels.  :-)

-- Bruce