d this language during the development of such a vocalic system remain unknown. Something that stands out with suggestive significance is the striking resemblance of the Spanish vowels, in articulation and timbre and in the simplicity of their phonological totality, to the ones of the prehistoric Basque tongue" (Navarro, 1968). It is an agglutinative language which does not belong to the Indo-European family, but seems to be affiliated with Caucasian languages.
For the English speaker, unfortunately, this vocalic simplicity is contrasted sharply with the fourteen diphthongs and the forty-two phonemes of Spanish. Just the nineteen consonant phonemes represent over thirty sounds - not to mention the countless dialectal variations. As Navarro points out: "To this, one has to add six falling diphthongs, eight rising diphthongs, and four triphthongs" (Navarro, 1968).
3. English and Spanish phonetics: a comparison
Luckily for North Americans as well as Latin Americans, both English and Spanish use the same vowel letters, viz. a, e, i, o, u. However, whereas Spanish uses these letters to represent but five clear open sounds, English uses them to stand for a good many more. Spanish is basically a phonetic language, i.e. its orthography approximates closely the sounds its represents. As to English...it is quite complex in this respect.
Look at English innumerable allophones, for example (An allophone is a speech sound constituting one of the phonetic manifestations or variants of a particular phoneme): tea/very or bad/part. Think of the countless diphthongs: paint, goal, kind, vow, oyster, idea, vary, poor. It would not even be far-fetched to call all English vowels diphthongs, because rarely are they "pure" - including in their alphabetical pronunciation. In English, moreover, all diphthongs are generally falling. "In Spanish, all falling diphthongs are closing and most rising ones are opening" (Finch, 1982). Is it not ...