U.S. Surnames with No Vowels
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Native speaker here, these are in fact two different words, since the change that happens in the root of the word 'Srb' that converts it to 'Srp' when the suffix 'ski' is added is called Consonant voicing or originally 'Jednacenje suglasnika po zvucnosti'.
"equalizaton of consonants on [the basis of] voicedness"
Such things can be observed in every English speaking countries I would say. As those surnames were actually picked randomly, and when they/their descendants moved again, they most likely carried that randomly chosen surname with them. And now it becomes quirks that lots of surnames of different spellings are actually exactly the same in their origin. Lots of descendants of immigrants no longer neither can read or write in their own language but English, some might be either able to read or write but hardly anyone can do both.
So even immigrants coming from places that have surnames can have lots of variety before taking into account there isn't always a single best way to write a name in the Latin script.
Or whatever was the first thing that came to the mind of the clerk that was filling out the papers. I know a guy whose family name became "Bohunk" at Ellis Island.
Škrt plch z mlh Brd pln skvrn z mrv prv hrd scvrnkl z brzd skrz trs chrp v krs vrb mls mrch srn čtvrthrst zrn.
The meaning of the sentence is:
Stingy dormouse from Brdy mountains fogs full of manure spots firstly proudly shrank a quarter of handful seeds, a delicacy for mean does, from brakes through bunch of Centaurea flowers into scrub of willows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Str%C4%8D_prst_skrz_krk
I just walked around Brdy yesterday, but I didn't meet any stingy dormouse. They must be rare.
It is vowel-less only from the perspective of the languages where "R" and "L" can be only consonants, i.e. they must always belong to syllables where another sound is the vowel (i.e. the peak of sonority).
In Czech and in many other present or past languages, including in the Proto-Indo-European, "R" and "L" can be both consonants and vowels, depending on the neighbour sounds.
While there are many languages where "R" and "L" cannot be vowels, in almost all languages "I" and "U" can be either vowels or consonants, also depending on their environment.
There are languages where even "E" and "O" can be consonants in certain environments, not only vowels. There are also languages where the nasal plosives or even some sibilants may be vowels, not only consonants.
In general, only "A" is always a vowel and only the non-nasal plosives are always only consonants.
For the other sounds of intermediate sonority, it varies from language to language whether they are used only as consonants or only as vowels, or they may be used as either consonants or vowels, depending on the environment.
For example, in many English dialects "bottle" has two syllables and the second syllable is just an "L". But that L is still a consonant.
The difference is mostly in whether the second syllable is just the /l/ or also contains a schwa. I don't think there are any dialects where the word is monosyllabic as that would probably require making the /t/ completely silent (not just a glottal stop).
Such terms are e.g. "obstruents", "sonorants", "nasals" etc.
The word "consonant" (like all Latin grammatical terms it was a calque after a Greek term) was defined more than 2000 years ago as "con-" + "-sonant", i.e. a sound pronounced together with another in a syllable and not pronounced independently, like a vowel.
The original word has nothing to do with the manner of articulation of the sound, but only about how it is combined in speech.
The terms "semivowel" or "semiconsonant" that are sometimes used, are not helpful at all, because in a given word any sound is either used as a vowel or as a consonant and not as something between them.
Some sounds are always used as vowels, some are always used as consonants and others are sometimes used as vowels and sometimes used as consonants.
The partitioning of the sounds between these 3 classes varies from language to language and this fact needs to be understood by whoever wants to understand the pronunciation of foreign languages.
It is necessary to have 2 terms for the 2 kinds of roles that sounds may have in a syllable. "Consonant" has the right original definition and etymology for one of the roles and there is no better alternative and no reason to replace it.
It is much less established what "vowel" should mean, because it is used both in the traditional sense for the sounds that are the syllabic peak of sonority and for a particular class of sounds based on the articulation type, i.e. for those where the vocal tract is less constricted than for other classes of sounds.
If "vowel" is assigned to refer strictly to the articulation kind, then the only existing term that can be used for the role in a syllable would be "syllabic".
With this term choice, one can say that "I" is a vowel that is syllabic in "pin" and consonant in "yard" and that "N" is a nasal sonorant that is syllabic in "button" and consonant in "nut".
However, if "vowel" is restricted as a name for a class of sounds, then it is not more surprising to have human names without vowels then e.g. having human names without dental obstruents or human names without any other particular kind of sounds.
The supposedly surprising fact was the existence of human names without syllabic sounds. Had that been true, the names would have been unpronounceable. So "vowel" in the thread title had to mean "syllabic" for the title to make sense.
In fact there is no surprise except for English speakers, because in other languages there are types of sounds that may be syllabic even if they cannot be syllabic in English.
The terminology is not uniform. There are many (typically in older literature) who call [m], [n], ... nasal plosives, in opposition with oral plosives [b], [d], ..., because the only difference between them is the open nasal path.
It is true however that having an open nasal path means that they are not really obstruents so they should not be called plosives according to more modern classifications that partition the sounds into obstruents and sonorants, where plosives belong to the obstruents.
However here I do not know how many are familiar with the more recent linguistic terms, so I tended to use more ancient terms.
I wonder how denasalized nasals like Korean [m͊] would fit into the picture then.
I did not know about that older terminology, thanks for explaining.
Nevertheless, according to Wikipedia, the Korean denasalized nasals are pronounced exactly like their oral counterparts, i.e. "b" instead of "m" and "d" instead of "n".
They use a special notation only because at their origin they were nasals and even now the denasalisation happens only in certain contexts and in certain cases the denasalisation is partial, the resulting sound being intermediate between the oral and the nasal variants (i.e. the nasal path is only partially open).
I don't speak Korean, but from hearing it I get the impression that it's more complicated than that:
Korean word-initial nasals vary randomly in their nasality. Sometimes they are partially nasal, sometimes there is no nasal airflow at all. And when they are fully denasalized, the resulting [b] and [d] are voiced for the full duration that they are held, while normal [b] and [d] resulting from word-medial /p/ and /t/ are only partially overvoiced i.e. similar to English /b/ and /d/.
The Parsis came from Iran to India to flee Islamic persecution. And they are among the "model minorities" in India.
There are many famous people with occupational last names. But I don’t know why. Did they not have last names originally?
Last name convention in India varies wildly. Bengalis, Marathis, Hindustanis go with the family last name. Many Muslims do not. They can choose among Ali, Sheikh, Mian, etc. South Indians often put their father's name as last name.
Did Parsis have none? I wonder.
Farokh Engineer [0] was a famous Indian cricketer.
I have even heard of names like Daruwala (seller of alcohol), Screwwala (screws), etc. IRL.
The wildest one that I have heard is SodaBottleOpenerWala [1]. Wala just means "having". So a seller of X would be X-wala [1a].
The Parsis are a influential minority who enjoy a good perception from the population. Homi Bhaba, FRS [2] was the father of Indian Nuclear Science. Sam Maneckshaw [3] was a legendary Field Marshal who helped liberate Bangladesh from Pakistan. Ratan Tata is the leader of Tata Group in India. They own Jaguar Land Rover brand.
Parsis were, and still somewhat are in prominent positions of Bollywood, science, military, and definitely industry.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farokh_Engineer
[1]: https://www.sodabottleopenerwala.in/food/the-story-behind-wa...
[1a]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallah
maybe in English but not in Slavic languages (at least not in western Slavic).
"prst skrz krk" [ˈpr̩st] [ˈskr̩s] [ˈkr̩k]
In Latin & Ancient Greek, which are the origin of the grammatical terms that most people learn in school, only A, E, I, O and U could be used as vowels. Because of that, when most people hear about vowels, they think about these sounds.
Nevertheless, in most languages there are also other sounds that can be used as vowels. Even in English, words like "listen" or "often" have 2 syllables and the vowel of the second syllable is "N". Another example is "people", which also has 2 syllables and the second vowel is "L". Among the English speakers, there are variations. In words like the previous examples, some speakers pronounce a short central vowel before the final "N" or "L", which remain consonants, but other speakers transition directly into the final "N" or "L" from the previous plosive, in which case "N" or "L" are the vowels of the second syllable.
Like in English, there are many languages where the liquids (e.g. "L", "R") or the nasals (e.g. "N", "M") may be used as vowels. While English has restrictions for where such vowels may appear, other languages allow their use in much more kinds of sound environments.
These kinds of sounds can be used as vowels when alone or when surrounded by sounds of lower sonority than them, because when they are pronounced there are also paths for the continuous expiration of air through the mouth or nose, even if they are more constricted than in the sounds more frequently used as vowels, e.g. AEIOU (i.e. like you can pronounce continuously AAAAAAAA, you can also pronounce for as long as you want LLLLLLLL or NNNNNNNNNNNN).
That's a vowel in there.
The word "srp" in Czech is a "sickle" - a tool for harvesting wheat: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srp From that, you get "Srpen" - "August", which is a "month of harvesting crops" (same in Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, etc).
Is it a coincidence that this glyph looks like a man, waving his hand?
You are 99% close. It actually means a person speaks loudly with palm hand
The situation with Chinese is similar. Pinyin is not a transliteration standard but a standard way of writing the Beijing dialect phonetically using Latin script.
I wonder if other areas in Europe do the same in reverse. (Though typing this out I realise that I grew up knowing a few people with a Polish and Italian surname that fits these patterns, so possibly that's why they stick out for me personally).
What’s so confusing about a háček?
These days I think the former is the standard but it definitely used to be the latter.
Then there's Nguyen. I don't understand.
The first is the only realistic choice in a lot of areas - if you are going from latin alphabet to latin alphabet. I'm not even sure how to spell my name to get a Norwegian-speaking person to pronounce it correctly, honestly, though a few folks that know it is a common American name do well. Even then, I'd have to first change it on my American passport and documents first. It isn't worth the trouble at all.
(But seriously, I'm curious. But also, out of privacy, don't.)
I presume that your name is then not a typical English name?
Nowadays, it would be considered disrespectful to call a language feature "confusing" (also it would sound dumb) so I don't think that's what the author is doing.
I disagree. IMO "confusing" is not a value judgement. It’s simply confusing to any person who doesn’t know this accent. I for example would have no idea what the difference between č and c is. That does not mean I lack respect or that I’m dumb, that simply means I don’t know it. I’d expect someone who never encountered German Umlauts to be confused when they encounter Ö. Hell, I’d even expect someone who never saw Latin letters before to be confused about Latin letters.
I'm going to guess, however, that the real reason for dropping them was due to typewriters (and later computers) that simply don't have them as an option. You can't print punctuation and letters that you simply don't have access to. ö, ø, å, æ and the like get dropped as well.
At least writing Č shows it's different to C.
When I say "ng", I say it almost like "oong", so there's a starting vowel. I can say it with an ending vowel like "nga". I suppose the consonant "ng" can be held, but it's hard to say it without pronouncing a vowel somewhere.
Note: This opinion is not scientific.
It just takes a bit of practice. The surname Ng is pronounced without a vowel in Cantonese.
It's true that you can't really have a stop-only word in isolation, but they can still exist with other words depending on how you define what a word is.
You could consider "'d", the contracted form of "would", "had", or "did", to be a word in English. If you didn't, it would imply that "you'd", "I'd", "Mary'd" etc. must be words in their own right which is a bit ridiculous.
A good example in another language would be 't and 'k in Dutch, since they're also written with spaces separating them.
Similar problems with Croatia vs Serbia vs Yugoslavia are discussed in others’ comments.
Surely "Mr. Death" is a bit unusual in its own right?
Interesting to see Yugoslavia being mentioned when the town is in present-day Croatia (as per the link in the post).
I’m thinking either the author had an old map (very common in the US) and has noticed this town before, or identifies as being from Yugoslavia from growing up there at one point (and adopting some identity politics that still separates Serbia), or thinks its synonymous to call the region yugoslavia like the region of nordics has its own name which would just be wrong
I think these days we're meant to use "the Balkans" and understand by context that we don't mean Greece. But it's much less precise.
That said, in this context "a town in Croatia" would have been correct, uncontroversial and more precise.
Or Albania. Or Romania. Or possibly Bulgaria.
American English has it too, for example in pronounciation of "work".
But even in English, my ignorant self feels the I in "Kirk" is pointless and unnecessary :-)
What I wanted was a word for the southern Slavic _region_, encompassing former Yugoslavia as well as Bulgaria and other territories in adjacent countries. But I couln't find a word for it, and it was getting late.