Mercenary:- I believe that you will find the unwritten vowels to which you refer are certainly non-existent in script, but exist only in speech, where they are identified as "allophones". In other words, the vowels do not exist, they only appear to exist because of pronunciation.
An allophone is a variation of the phoneme, and this variation can be inconsistent, varying from geographic location to geographic location, and forming a contributing factor to regional accents, it can even vary from person to person where it can assist in identifying an individual speaker.
This occurs in all languages.
(a phoneme is a unit of sound in a particular language; an allophone is a variation of a spoken phoneme)
My apologies for the pedantry, but my post #9 was the short version of a 20 minute lecture.
Ariel:- I am 100% on your side of this debate, not that I have much interest at all in kards, or karuds, or cards, or careds, or gareds, or pesh-kabz either for that matter, but I do have an interest in language.
What I can see here is something that has existed in my own field of interest (the keris) forever. Whole Ensiklopedias have been written that rotate around this variation in name and pronunciation, and what we have at the present time in the field of keris study is a number of kinds of Collectorise --- or Kulicterize if you prefer --- where the words used by one group of people are unrecognisable to another group of people.
However, in any attempts to achieve conformity in the written representation of a spoken sound we do encounter some insurmountable barriers.
Then there are other difficulties when we come to the term of reference used to name or describe any physical object.
Although I do try to be precise in my own communication, I still sometimes fail in this.
It is reasonable to accept that others can be less than precise also, provided that clarification can be achieved in discussion.
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