Last night my wife and I had a chat. She said that one thing she likes about the tongue used in this land is that there are a lot of words with but the one sound in them. This was not like her own birth tongue, in which a lot of the words have three or four sounds in them. "This is true" I said. "A lot of the key words used here have but one sound in them - earth, sun, moon, man, child, birth, death and so on. In fact, I bet you I could write a whole post on my blog and not have to use one word which has more than one sound in it."
"Go on then" she said.
Please feel free to add a word or two or your own. But be sure to use just the words which have one sound each in them.
8 comments:
Hate to take you up on this, Gypp, but all of those words have more than one sound. One syllable, yes, but at least a vowel and one consonant each.
It is odd that the name for words which have but one sound in them, as you have said, is so long.
That is quite hard actually.
Oh damn.
I was most glad to read this as I have the mind the size of a pea on the first morn of the week, and so long words would be a real bitch right now.
(Quite a lot a diphthongs, though, Gyp - can we go one better and eliminate these too? No, in English, I expect not.)
Boyo - This is true. I thought of the word 'beat' (as in music), but Mrs Boyo took me to task for what it did to your clothes last time I used the word "beat" in front of you. (Any other monosyllablic word for syllable would be much appreciated.)
Jules - Now you see how hard it is. Oh dear - now Mrs B. will be mad at me once more...
Gadj - I think this may be the true cause for this thing of which we speak. If beer has been drunk that ere night, one sound per word is all that you can cope with.
Thanks for the reminder, Gyppo. French freak Georges Perec wrote an entire novel with the letter "e", thereby shaming his peers who had only managed to do without a plot.
Boyo - Should that not be with *out* the letter 'e'? A novel with only the letter 'e' would be rather bizarre, but just about plausible for a Frenchy.
Walter Abish did something even more odd:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_Africa
Ooo
Duh?
Sx
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