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(see edit below before you answer!)

I'm not a linguist, but I've always been fascinated by the fact that in Czech, there is a 9-letter word without a single vowel: čtvrthrst. It means "quarter of a handful" and although it's not really commonly used, it isn't nonsensical either. Some other Czech words without vowels can be found here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Czech_words_without_vowels

Now I'm curious whether there are even longer words without vowels in other languages. I have tried googling, but only got results for English words which are not very impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_words_without_vowels.

Does anybody know where to find more and if there are words without vowels that have 10 letters or more?


EDIT:

The question is posed in simple terms with many inaccurate assumptions (e.g. what is a vowel? can we compare consonants and vowels across languages? is it letters or sounds that matter?) because that's how I (and surely many others) have been wondering about it for some time. The accepted answer, however, reveals a deeper problem. Realizing that a seemingly simple question is not so simple after all is, I think, why we all come to this website.

So, to specify my question, rather than asking for a record-breaking word, can we even ask such a question in the first place? Does it make sense to ask it? And why?

honzukka
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    I’m voting to close this question because it's trivia and has nothing to do with the scientific study of language. – curiousdannii Apr 18 '21 at 22:14
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    @curiousdannii I agree that the way the question was posed invites a type of response where people just shout words and argue about how long or meaningful they are. However, user6726 recognized (as I suspected) that a better way to pose the question is: "Can we ask what the longest word without vowels is?" and provided a great response to it. This, I think, has a lot to do with the scientific study of language. So what do you say I edit the question with this in mind? It has certainly helped me learn something about linguistics! – honzukka Apr 19 '21 at 07:38
  • Define "vowel". – OrangeDog Apr 19 '21 at 12:52
  • You can't make major changes with an edit like that, because you invalidate some of the answers that way. Instead open a new question. – Keelan Apr 22 '21 at 06:20
  • Vowels are like angels : just because you don't see them (in writing), does not mean they're not there (in pronunciation). ;-) – Lucian May 16 '21 at 00:31

3 Answers3

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The question could be interpreted as being about "vowel letters". "Twyndyllyngs" is a candidate: said to come from Welsh. If we take "vowels" to be the letters [ieaou], then Norwegian råbygg has no vowels. The defect in the reasoning there is that in Norwegian, y, å, ø, æ are also "vowel letters", so you have to assume some definition of "vowel letter" for each language. Then in Arabic you write sentences without vowels: رأيت الكلب , although there are some diacritics that allow you to mark vowels, which are used in the Qur'an and in language-teaching materials. In Tigrinya, a word like ባልዶንጓ "beans" has no vowel letters – because every letter is a combination of a consonant and a vowel. And then there is the fact that Chinese writing (characters, as opposed to pinyin romanization) doesn't have letters at all. So the question might need to be limited to alphabetic systems (excluding Arabic, Tigrinya, Chinese), and then we'd need to define the vowel letters individually for each language. That can be done.

The other interpretation is about vowel sounds, which will reduce the count for words of Nuxalk like "lh" which is one sound [ɬ], "th" and "ng" in English when they are the sounds [θ, ŋ]. This brings us to Nuxalk (Bella Coola) and Tamazight (in the broadest sense) = Berber, and potentially Kabardian. These are languages said to have few or no vowels. However, if you listen to Kabardian, you would not think "Gosh, that language has no vowels!", you would hear dozens of vowels. So we have to talk about "vowel sounds" in at least two different ways, one being phonological where the question is "do we look at the 'phonemic' representation of the word" and the other being based on actual physical output. The claim about Kabardian is kind of based on analytic trickery of phonemicisation, so that language is not all that exotic.

The problem with answering the question at the phonetic level is that there isn't a well-justified phonetic definition of "vowel" as distinct from "consonant release" that doesn't presuppose a particular analysis of these languages (or similar languages). "tsskʃftstt" is a word of the Tashlhiyt dialect said to have no vowels, but does it have a bunch of voiceless schwas or does it have no vowels and a bunch of noisy consonants that simply sound like there are surrounding vowels? Languages do have voiceless vowels (Comanche, but should we not count them as vowels? Is there a vowel in the ordinary casual pronunciation of "potato" – [pʰtʰɛɪɾoʊ] or [pʰə̥tʰɛɪɾoʊ]?

Reliance on raw sound is not a tenable approach, IMO, because there's no language-independent definition of "vowel" based on pure physical sound that doesn't either arbitrarily declare that voiceless vowels aren't vowel, or else force consonants to often be declared to be consonant plus vowel sequences because the consonant has some amount of release.

That all said, the previously-posted Nuxalk example seems to win the prize at least based on current linguistic literature 13 vs 10. The Nuxalk word apparently actually includes an enclitic /kʷt͡sʼ/, perhaps clitics can also be tacked on to the Tashlhiyt word to make it longer.

ikegami
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user6726
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    I am honestly amazed by the spectrum of languages you discussed. I know that this is SE Linguistics but as a physicist (by education) or IT (by work) I could not speak that broadly of my area. Chapeau bas. – WoJ Apr 18 '21 at 20:27
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    Well, in Welsh, w is unambiguously a vowel letter, as is y. – TRiG Apr 18 '21 at 22:04
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    @user6726 On Tashilhiyt Berber: Words like /tsskʃftstt/ indeed have no vowels whatsoever — voiced epenthetic vowels are rare, and any voiceless epenthetic vowels are difficult enough to distinguish that they may as well not be there. (Source: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00382862/document) Also, Wikipedia has a Shilha utterance which beats the Nuxalk example: /fr.ħʁs.lm.ʕrf.tn.nk/ ‘I’m glad to make your acquaintance’, 14 phonemes. – bradrn Apr 19 '21 at 00:41
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    This answer seems to have been written with the assumption that readers have already read the other answers on this page (it uses phrases like "the Nuxalk example" despite never listing any Nuxalk example). Now that this is the accepted and topvoted answer, that assumption doesn't work. The answer should be edited to include any necessary information, or at least to explicitly refer to that information (e.g. with phrases like "in Joyful Sadness's answer" or whatnot). – ruakh Apr 19 '21 at 23:56
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    It's one thing that "vowel" is extremely difficult to define, but if you look at the question closely, it also assumes that "word" can be defined. In reality a similarly long answer could be written on why defining "word" is extremely problematic as well – maritsm Apr 20 '21 at 07:17
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There's a word (a sentence actually) in the Canadian language Bella Coola (aka Nuxalk) that only consists of obstruents (no vowels at all) and is longer than the Czech word you mentioned in the question:

  • clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts':

    [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]
    /xɬ-pʼχʷɬt-ɬp-ɬɬ-s=kʷt͡sʼ/

it translates to “then he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant” (Nater 1984)


Another example is:

  • [k’xɬːtʰsxʷ.sɬχʷtʰɬːt͡s]

and it means “you had seen that I had gone through a passage” (Nater 1984)


[All the above information comes from the Wikipedia article on Nuxalk]

Mellifluous
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    now I feel an unhealthy urge to group-travel to Georgia and provoke a situation in which I would be able to rightfully accuse a local of an act of collective peeling, so I could show off my newly acquired knowledge. – dlatikay Apr 19 '21 at 17:57
  • @dlatikay it may be easier to smuggle a largish dog there and then ask for a trainer – John Dvorak Apr 21 '21 at 09:52
  • I don't think Georgian has any words at all with no vowels though. – hippietrail Apr 23 '21 at 02:55
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    @dlatikay: I satisfied my urge to travel to Georgia and ask random locals to გვფრცქვნი a decade ago and feel all the more healthy for doing so. Fortunately for me a I travelled alone. დავაი. – hippietrail Apr 23 '21 at 03:20
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Some claim that vzcvrnkls exists. It is pretty artificial, though, even if perfectly pronounceable.

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    (I may be wrong, but I hear a clear vowel after the [r] in the recording you linked to.) – Mellifluous Apr 18 '21 at 14:57
  • @JoyfulSadness Which vowel in particular? I have experience of Brittons being completely unable to say Brno, they always say Bruno. However, no such vowel is in the city's first syllable, it is just [ˈbr̩no]. – Vladimir F Героям слава Apr 18 '21 at 16:58
  • It sounds something like a raised ɐ to me – Mellifluous Apr 18 '21 at 18:51
  • @JoyfulSadness I am not aware of such sound in Czech phonology. There used to be vowels (accompanying, svarabhactic) that accompanied the syllabic liquids in Old Czech but it is not clear, when they were just graphical), but that is no longer the case, it is really normally analysed as [r̩] (although the points raised by user6726 do apply). – Vladimir F Героям слава Apr 18 '21 at 19:23
  • This is technically two words which are however written together in Czech. The first one is a verb "vzcvrnkl", contributing 2 syllables, and the second one is another verb "s", contributing no additional syllables. If you try to analyze "vzcvrnkls" as a single verb, you'll likely end up with postulating a null ending before a suffix, which is impossible in Czech. Cf. "vzcvrnklas" for a form with a non-null ending. – Jirka Hanika Apr 18 '21 at 21:11
  • @JirkaHanika It is an enclitic form of the past tense auxiliary. It is normally analysed, and also pronounced, as a single word. At least for these purposes that are concerned about phonetics or orthography, not about morphology or etymology. – Vladimir F Героям слава Apr 18 '21 at 21:28
  • @VladimirF - orthographically, sure. Phonetically, you can hardly expect a word with 0 syllables to carry its own lexical stress. Some Czech words come without any lexical stress. Like this "s", which is a non-syllabic form of the verb "být". Or like any of the numerous clitics. For example "To se mu povedlo" counts as 4 words, not two, although there are only 2 (lexical) stress units in the sentence. – Jirka Hanika Apr 18 '21 at 22:18
  • @JirkaHanika But notice that you can easily slowly say "To se mu povedlo.". You cannot, however", say "Napsal s to?". – Vladimir F Героям слава Apr 20 '21 at 14:27
  • @VladimirF - Sure you can, and you need to use the syllabic form of the word whenever it is used in isolation. "napsal si to?" However, this isn't spontaneous use of the spoken language. It's more like spelling out the words for a foreigner to understand. – Jirka Hanika Apr 20 '21 at 14:42
  • I agree that the speaker in the audio clip linked to is producing something more like [vᵊɾᵊŋ] than [vr̩ŋ]. There’s definitely only one tap, so even with no epenthetic vowels (though it does sound like there are those as well), it would be [vɾ̩ŋ]. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 13 '22 at 19:28
  • @JanusBahsJacquet It may be realizes as a tap, it is an option, depending on how careful the speaker is. E.g. casual speech vs. public speech. However, I do not think Czech syllabic consonants are commonly analyzed as using epenthetic vowels (phonetic analysis of Slovak - very similar: https://doi.org/10.1515/labphon.2011.009 ). In Northeast Bohemia the dialect can show some real epenthetic es (prkno -> perkno), but it is a dialect. I added my take on this word to https://forvo.com/word/vzcvrnkls/#cs – Vladimir F Героям слава Jan 13 '22 at 20:51
  • @VladimirF Yours is much more clearly an actual syllabic [r̩] than the female speaker. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 13 '22 at 20:54