bo gi ru sa
af er og um
There are about 250 legal two word combinations in the english language, looking just at the basic vowels - a,e,i,o,u,y and the remaining 20 consonants. I'm allowing y to be a pseudo-consonant for some extra combinations.
There are apparently 101 legal two letters words in Scrabble - though some are interjections, abbreviations or foreign words. Oh, and there is "aa" and "oe"...
This is strange, since two letter words are useful, and english does not use many of the nicer ones, like the ones above.
Now, some of that is because english is a hybrid with heavy latin influences on a root germanic language; some is drift and convergence; and some is due to poor orthography and phonetics - eg there is no "se" but there is "see" and "sea" which are prononounced near enough to identically in modern english. Some are also lost to three letter words due to silent "e" or "h"s, and some are either not pronouncable in english, eg "xo" or are too close to existing words.
But that still leaves a bunch of really nice combos - like "er" and "af"!
We need to make use of these. (Of course they are perfectly nice words in other languages but that need not stop us). While we are at it, english needs more vowels.
It is also worth noting that the two top words in frequency in standard tomes, per Zipf's law are two letter words, "the" and "of" (ok, that depends of course on which corpus of work is used, but this is pretty generic) - wot you think "the" has three letters? Did I mention poor orthography? It is of course really "þe"!
There are apparently 972 three letter word and of course the number of legal vowel-consonant combinations increase factorially with word length, but the number of longer length words in actual use does not of course increase exponentially with word length.
Apparently the true word length distribution approaches Poissonian (ok, actually a geometric distribution, they let this stuff on arXiv? oh, comp lang, ok) - google knows why...
If I read correctly, the number of short words is larger for polyphonic languages, because languages with a smaller number of syllables tend to make longer words by stringing them together. Makes sense.
So we are not actually in danger of running out of useful euphonic words like "cosmicur"
'Course for languages which permit compounding of words, the question does not make sense, since the number of potential words that could be constructed grows factorially with the number of root words.
That seems like a useful attribute.
What is scary is that I had a good work related reason to ponder this, and it took me the best part of a week to let go of it to this extent.
I was seriously tempted to type out all the two letter combos in english and highlight the legal words to do some pattern checking. We can all be glad I resisted this temptation.
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I think you should er on the side of caution and drop "er" from your list.
Thank you for this opportunity to er out our differences on this matter.
Shouldn't the orthography for "the" be "ðe", not "þe" (i.e., edh, not thorn)?
I think that the text messaging community would say that ur 2 l8.
Nah, never use ð at the beginning of a word - it is the softer "th" sound, whereas þ is always at the beginning of a word.
I presume someone has checked if txt is orthographically as consistent as other variants? I presume it is at least as consitent as LOL? Hm. might be worth a google.
Course using numerals expands the effective syllables significantly, but honestly it'd be easier just to adopt some of the already existing vowels from other germanic languages.
Icelandic would lease you some.
Oh. Um.
Er, you are arguably right about er, but I think phonetic transcriptions of interjections shouldn´t really count as words in a language.
Er, YMMV.
"...I think phonetic transcriptions of interjections shouldn´t really count as words in a language..."
Oh, do you really think so?
Ah ha.
OK, now I'm confused (regarding edh vs. thorn).
The "th" in the word "thorn" is the unvoiced fricative, while the "th" in the word "the" is the voiced fricative. English really does have 2 different initial sounds that are both spelled with "th".
I'll grant you that Norse (or Icelandic, or whatever you want to call it) doesn't start a word with edh, but is it the case that thorn is used in Norse for both initial sounds, or is it that, in Norse, an initial "th" is always unvoiced?
Anyways, in linguistics, the symbol for the voiced fricative, whether initial or not, is ð.
Um, 'w' is also variable, like 'y', doing double-duty.
There is one word in which 'w' is the only vowel -- 'crwth' -- an old musical instrument.
There is one word in which 'w' is the only vowel -- 'crwth' -- an old musical instrument.
Actually, two: 'cwm', a kind of hollow in mountains, is the other.
Both are of course taken from Welsh, so these words are just symptoms of the way English agglomerates words and their associated phonetics from other languages.
I love and admire linguists. Particularly some linguists.
They had a choice to make, and it is linguistic theory. But for this fricative they chose poorly...
I always felt losing the great vowel "double-u" for a phonetically indistinguishable consonant (see Jonesssssssssssson entry below) was a poor trade.
Though I do admire the welsh ability to make any multiplet of consonants into a vowel.
It's been a long time since I majored in Linguistics, but...
Ni bo gi ru sa af er og um.
In most English dialects Ni will be homonymic with knee, bo with bow and ru with rue. Gi has been adopted into English (karate uniform).
I'm not sure English orthographic rules allow sa, or allow it to be anything other than a homonym for say.
Er and um lack semantic values but are functional in spoken discourse.
That leaves 2 of your nine examples that might be available for semantic use: af and og. Would you pronounce 'af' as 'av' or 'aff'?
Hm. I'm sorry but consider the Monty Python lads an authority on the correct anglophonic pronounciation of "ni" and it is quite distinct from "knee".
Do you mean "bow" as in archery tool or "bow" as in end of performance audience acknowledgement? In either case it is clearly a short "o" like in "boring"!
The "ru" is distinct from "rue" (which is why the double vowel "ue" is used, natch?), one could go with "u" sound as in "up" or although I prefer the original which is slightly different.
Why not a short "a" for "sa" as opposed to the "ay"?
Spoken discourse might benefit tremendously if some use were found for "er" and "um", if nothing else it'd shorten the average academic presentation by 20%.
As for "af" it is of course not pronouced like either "av" or "aff", if it were I'd have written that.
Hm.
"sa" = "sir" - "yes-sah!"
You don't want to use all possible combinations; the interword distance gets too short and the risk of misunderstandings increase too much. Especially for commonly used (thus important) words.
That silent "h" is a curse upon the language.
Keeping proper phonetic separation in interword space is indeed an important feature of a language. It is not a feature in english though - I blame the french.
People who know all those otherwise useless two letter words and flash them out at Scrabble deserve thrashing around the head with the board. Regardless of age or sex.