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'
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.
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.
