27 April 2009

New short vowel discovered: ver funn

Language Log � New short vowel discovered: "the duration of the /Ih/ vowel, already known for its very short length in languages like English (to say nothing about it’s tremendous importance in Finnish), is produced in .11 hundredths of a second by a small band of speakers of Kwatnaksa, who live on an otherwise unoccupied island in the Indian Ocean. Well, at least linguists thought the name of that language was Kwatnaksa, but never before had they noticed the very short /Ih/ squeezed between the /t/ and the /n/, ... an abundance of very brief /Ih/ sounds in the middle of what the research team had hitherto believed to be consonant clusters. Intensive research quickly followed, revealing that the name of that language is actually Kiwatinakisa"

Please note the dtails of the piece, partcularl the date of t.

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