Laauhuahua Way, a road in Hawaii, has seven vowels and only three consonants! The words here seem to have an inordinate number of vowels to consonants, and there is a lot of repeating phrases in the words, such as the "lulu" in "Honolulu."

Other examples of their streets are "Laaunoni," "Kuipaakea," "Kuaeewa," "Maiaiholena," and "Maipalaoa."

Is there a name for languages that have a lot of vowels or repeating phrases within the words? Do those sorts of languages develop completely differently from the European languages?

I haven't an answer, but I'll point out there are probably more consonants in some of those words: they might be La'auhuahua, etc. The glottal stop ['] comes from an earlier *[k], and the current [k] comes from earlier *[t], so the Hawaiian for the Maori tiki should be ki'i.

Oh, that makes sense, aput! While in Hawai'i, I got very interested in those "glottal stops." Are they common in other languages? Some marks over letters in other languages* designate proununciation, like that curly sign over the n in Spanish (I don't remember what that sign is called), while others don't, is that correct? Or do they all designate pronunciation?

*Sorry to sound so ignorant, but I really know very little about lingistics.

Mostly diacritics indicate some differing pronunciation, but not always. The circumflex in French is often redundant, being just a relic of where a silent S used to occur in the spelling.

One thing French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese all do is to use accents to distinguish some homophones:

Fr. du 'of; some', dû 'had to; owed'
It. di 'of', dì 'day'

The curly thing over the "n" is a "tilde."

And speaking of which, a while back someone described the way in which we could use diacritical marks in our posts but I didn't make note of it at the time (thinking I'd never need it, diacritical marks being way over my head) and now I see I'm mistaken. In another thread (the OEDILF, natch) I wanted to write about something "a flambe" with the accent over the "e" and couldn't figure out how to do it.

A refresher course, please?

Thanks, but that's not exactly a full set. There are hundreds (thousands, maybe?) of these things.

Where to you go to "shop" for stuff like this?

Question: Where to [sic] you go to "shop" for stuff like this?

Answer: Elsewhere.

This page or this page (there are several to be found on the Web) show how you can type a code for it to appear as a special character in a Web page. For example to use a small letter e with an acute accent, you could type either

é or é

That will give you "é" in the message.

You can use Windows Character Map to find special characters for use in other documents -- I don't recommend using it for the forum, as folks with Macs won't see it properly.

I've mentioned this before -- see https://wordcraft.infopop.cc/eve/forums?a=tpc&s=441607094&f=932607094&m=4816035045&r=7436098075#7436098075 for example.

Thanks much, A. This is very helpful.