Nitpick: These are names with no _vowel letters_; many (if not all, depending on how you define what a vowel is) of these letters are pronounced with a vowel.
Yeah, a nice example for this is "myrrh" because it's a full word, not something paralinguistic like brrr. It's one of very few examples of English words that can in certain dialects be spelled and pronounced without a traditional vowel.
Generally, with an added yet invisible vowel. Entire languages are written without vowels as we (with the latin alphabet/english speakers) would know them. (Hebrew and Arabic are the languages I had in mind).
A vowel sound is a sound that can form a syllable alone, without being combined with other sounds, like a consonant, or which can be the peak of sonority in a syllable composed of multiple sounds.
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).
Western slavic languages still use a version of the 'Close unrounded central vowel' implicitly in pronounciation, even though it is not represented in writing. An example of this would be words in Romanian (which has a character representation for this sound) that were adopted from slavic languages. E.g. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C3%A2rlog#Romanian
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
Yugoslavia/Yugoslav/South Slavic is a handy name for the region and the language family. Unfortunately it's no longer a neutral name because there was a country with that name and using it might be seen as calling for reconstituting that country and in particular, uniting several nations under Serbian rule.
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.
I grew up with a colourful "visit Yugoslavia" poster in my bedroom in the sixties. I still think about it. Happy smiling ethnic/folkloric dressed people. Thirty years later, at each other's throats.
This explains exactly what I was trying to do. Thanks for understanding. I agree that I should have given up and just gone with “a town in Croatia”. I have corrected the article.
From what I remember from school, both Slovak and Serbo-Croatian (maybe all Slavic languages?) have this thing where "R" is behaving kinda like a vowel but it's not a vowel. Can't remember what it is called though.
I thought long and hard about that word and almost made up the nonceword "Southslavia" to replace it.
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.
Oh well, if you take a closer look, you will find why: most if not all of those with surnames look weird in English are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from a non-English speaking background. When they/their ancestors arrived, they most likely do not speak English at all or might be a couple of words, some of them might not even have a surname. When they arrived at the customs, they for sure needed something English on their papers. It would make sense to take what ever came to their mind at that moment as their surname.
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.
A famous case of this is the Danish man Victor Cornelins that was born in St. Croix but at the age of seven was brought to Denmark to become part of a human exhibition as a "negro kid" to attract visitors. His birth name was Cornelius which is not unusual in Danish so Cornelins must have been a simple writing mistake. However, this lapse is negligible compared to the racism he was subjected to.
This particular problem, of matching misspelled immigrant surnames was the reason for development of phonetic matching algorithms. See https://stevemorse.org/phonetics/bmpm2.htm
There are plenty native English surnames that came about before spellings standardized leading to (in the case of my own) Metcalf, Metcalfe, Medcalfe, Medcalf, Midcalfe, Midcalf all being the same name.
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.
> It would make sense to take what ever came to their mind at that moment as their surname.
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.
Some surnames that look weird in English happened because there was a word in one language being written with another language's spelling assumptions. (Mine is one that works like that.)
Another strange transliteration is the most common Vietnamese-descent surname Nguyễn, pronounced roughly as Win, n-Win or n-Yen (with the n being very quiet). I do wonder why these difficult transliterations were chosen over more obvious ones.
It's not a transliteration. Vietnamese is written using Latin script. Because the modern script is still relatively new, there is a strong correspondence between the written form and the standard pronunciation. And because Vietnamese is not Latin, many odd-looking compromises had to be made to represent all the sounds using something resembling the Latin alphabet.
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.
From my very cursory research it could depend on where in Vietnam the person is from. I only did the research because I stumbled over several youtube videos where people were like "you are stupid if you don't pronounce it win" but I thought the guy I knew at school should probably know his name better than random youtube person and he definitely pronounced it between 'n-Yen' and 'n-Youn(g)'.
Or "Huáng" (黄) or "Ruǎn" (阮) or maybe something else, depending on what the actual surname is and where they're from. (阮 is also the Chinese character for the Vietnamese surname Nguyễn.)
There's not many accents or variations from basic ascii in english, so anything squiggly is usually confusing. In my language we use a few accents and character variations and I often meet Americans who have never seen such character variations like ç and get confused. Perhaps the author had similar experiences.
I think it's confusing to non-speakers of Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croat and Slovene because they may just not be 100% on how it should be pronounced. Quite a few names get mangled when used in US English even when the letters don't have háčky, čárky etc. Brett Favre becomes "Brett Farve", Weird Al Yankovic's surname is pronounced "Yankovik" (not "Yankovitch"), anything ending in "-owski" is pronounced "OW-skee" (instead of ov-skee).
There are generally two choices for immigrants to any country really. You either keep the spelling of your name or you (try to) keep the pronunciation.
These days I think the former is the standard but it definitely used to be the latter.
There are generally two choices for immigrants to any country really. You either keep the spelling of your name or you (try to) keep the pronunciation.
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.
My name is very, very common! But it starts with an American "a" sound and I'm not even sure there is an equal in Norwegian. Sometimes folks recognize it and pronounce it correctly, especially if they've spent time in the US.
Ah I forget sometimes that Americans have an extra pronunciation of "a" - so the name Andy would be "Endy" while in UK English and probably Norwegian, we'd say "Ah-ndy" (while I guess we both say "heart" with the same "ah")
I read that with an almost sarcastic tone. I don't think the author thinks it's confusing, they're probably mocking the immigration officers who found them confusing and chose to simply erase them.
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.
> Nowadays, it would be considered disrespectful to call a language feature "confusing" (also it would sound dumb)
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.
Unless you are exposed to the languages, no one realistically knows how to pronounce them.
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.
As of now, the longest vowel-less meaningful sentence in Czech is:
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.
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.
You're conflating syllabic consonants and vowels. Phonetically, R and L are always consonants. The distinction between consonants and vowels is not in whether they can appear by themselves as syllables.
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.
How is it known, about bottle, whether it has one or two syllables? According to the sonority sequencing principle, /l/ has a higher sonority than /t/ or a glottal stop; so one would expect bottle to always have two syllables (this is reflected in transcriptions provided by Merriam-Webster's or Cambridge Advanced Learner's). When would this not be the case?
It depends on the dialect but in many cases the /l/ is syllabic.
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).
You are right only if you redefine the word "consonant" to mean a name attached permanently to certain sounds based on their kind of articulation, regardless how they are used in a word.
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.
While I know a little about written Korean, I am not familiar with the Korean pronunciation.
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).
> 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".
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/.
As a European, when I think of stereotypical 'American' surnames, it's often the European ones that are not common near me that I think of, particularly Polish names ending in -ski and Italian names ending in -i.
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).
> I'm not sure whether Srp is similar. The Serbian-language word for the Serbian language itself is Srpski (српски), but srp is also Slavic for “sickle”...
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'.
The letters R, L, M can create a syllable in the czech language, similar to vowels. All words in the article are single-syllable words.
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).
It says it's Cantonese, not Mandarin. There are many ethnic Chinese in Vietnam (Hoa), and many of them speak Cantonese or are descended from Cantonese speakers.
I don't think truly vowel-less words can exist, unless the consonants can all be "held" like {rr, sh, th, zh, l}. If a consonant cannot be held, like {b, k, t, d}, then there has to be a vowel somewhere.
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.
> I suppose the consonant "ng" can be held, but it's hard to say it without pronouncing a vowel somewhere.
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.
wonder if it is a coincidence that it is more prevalent in cantonese speaking regions, where the dialect is far more tonal than mandarin due to its use of more tones
The author appears to mostly randomly choose from a menu of Slavic options, both wrt etymology and geography. For example “smrt” means “death” across Slavic languages, yet Czech is randomly chosen to be mentioned in the article.
Similar problems with Croatia vs Serbia vs Yugoslavia are discussed in others’ comments.
The doctor who is mentioned does likely belong to the Parsi community of India.
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadThat's a vowel in there.
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).
maybe in English but not in Slavic languages (at least not in western Slavic).
"prst skrz krk" [ˈpr̩st] [ˈskr̩s] [ˈkr̩k]
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Cornelins
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.
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.
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.
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/.
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).
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"
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).
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.
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
https://www.zdic.net/hans/%E5%90%B4
Similar problems with Croatia vs Serbia vs Yugoslavia are discussed in others’ comments.
Surely "Mr. Death" is a bit unusual in its own right?
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
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homi_J._Bhabha
[3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Manekshaw