If you’re curious, any YouTube video featuring dashcam footage of car crashes or railroad crossing fails will include plenty of pictures of current era Russian stop signs. Most such vids are far more wacky than they are horrifying. Watching one isn’t setting you up to see blood and guts.
I’ve just been reading a magazine piece (about phrasebooks, as it happens) that tells me that Estonian has 14 case endings, no future tense, two different infinitives but one word for “he” and “she”, and something called the partitive plural. Makes Latin look like child’s play.
I took all the Finnish lessons Duolingo had to offer. It was so undersupplied, it barely got to the past tense at all - it included the past tense of olla ‘to be’ in the very last lesson. I wanted to learn Estonian after that, but it wasn’t offered. Now I’m well along in Hungarian. I love Uralic. I was ecstatic when in a used bookstore I found The Finno-Ugric Languages and Peoples by Hajdú Péter.
“Vowels for the Welsh! Vowels for the Welsh! Vowels for the Welsh!”
“Take some from the Irish. They don’t know how to use them anyway.”
No, don’t give any more letters to the Welsh. They’ll just waste them, by creating names like Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
They should start an exchange program with the Hawaiians. There are probably a few spare vowels in Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatah
Nitpick: that’s actually a Maori name, being a hill in New Zealand. But all the Polynesian languages have a surfeit of vowels, so your point is well taken.
They have vowels, just the Ieuans are hogging them all.
Everyone who wants more vowels should form a queue.
And donate them when strengths warrant it.