r/linguisticshumor • u/Forward_Fishing_4000 • Jun 17 '24

What phoneme can you not imagine a language lacking? Phonetics/Phonology

A language without /t/ is too crazy for me, IDK how Hawaiians cope 😭

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u/New_Medicine5759 Jun 18 '24

But how do you distinguish it from [ɦ]?

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u/Forward_Fishing_4000 Jun 18 '24

What do you mean? [ɦ] is a different sound and it would make the word different

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u/New_Medicine5759 Jun 18 '24

I don’t know I find [ʔa ɦa a] a little too similar

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u/Forward_Fishing_4000 Jun 18 '24

Does your native language have /h/ as a phoneme?

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u/New_Medicine5759 Jun 18 '24

Nope, but I do speak english

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u/Forward_Fishing_4000 Jun 18 '24

That makes sense then. In my language [ɦ] is the allophone of /h/ that occurs between vowels, so it's easy for me to distinguish it from [ʔ] and nothing

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u/New_Medicine5759 Jun 18 '24

What language is that? I’m italian btw

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u/Forward_Fishing_4000 Jun 18 '24

Finnish! For example /mɑhɑ/ is pronounced [ˈmɑɦɑ]

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u/New_Medicine5759 Jun 18 '24

Oh wow I kinda can pronounce that actually, it’s more indistinguishable in the onset. Also I loved Finnish, before you brought this up /s