Holger Dansk wrote:
These knuckleheads keep talking about spoken language which began about
30,000 years ago. I wonder if they even know what a vowel is?

Better than you do.

For their information, the modern English vowels are a, e, i, o, and u.

No. Those are the alphabetic symbols for vowels. The typical dialect
of English has some 15 different vowels, as exemplified and symbolized
at
http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon.../newstart.html

These are letters that are written, and they should have learned how to
write some letters in the first grade. Written language began about
3,000 years ago.

Vowels are a phenomenon of spoken language. There are USUALLY more of
them than there are representations in an alphabet.

We are not talking about some guttural grunting noises made 20,000 or
30,000 years ago. Forget about that doo doo.

We have no way of knowing what kind of language existed 20,000 or
30,000 years ago. It likely was NOT "grunting noises" though,
clueless.

lojbab
--
lojbab
Bob LeChevalier, Founder, The Logical Language Group
(Opinions are my own; I do not speak for the organization.)
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org