By borrowing, we have bw/pw words: e.g., bwana, Puerto Rico.
French has voila. I would not be suprised if they have fw too.
As for the trw combo in trois, my hair stands on end. It's a different
R, I think.
Since we're doing a bit of French, there's that town across the St.
Larry from Montreal: Longueuil (where the Expo was, if I remember
correctly). This is an *impossible* run of vowels for English, or at
least, us Etats-Uniques. I had a wonderful phone conversation making a
hotel reservation for the Holiday Inn that was on St. Hubert/St.
Catherine East in Montreal. The clerk went thru the Holiday Inns in
metro Montreal and made a great pause when he came to Longueuil.
"Lon~Gwee" is as close as I can get. Four con-effing-secutive vowels!
You effin wanna effin coin the effin word didiphthong.
My other bad is Anilouh and ennui: apparent homophones (Did I spell
the playwright's name right?).
--- In cybalist@..., "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...> wrote:
> Mark O:
> >The point of this post is that there are lots of clear, distinct
> >sounds a native-speaker of English can easily produce, but there
are
> >few or no words using these sounds. Bw/pw is another example.
>
> However, we *do* have sounds like /pw/ and /bw/ in English, via
> words of French origin. Most people have heard of "menage a
> trois" with the even stranger /trw/ combination in "trois".
> Compared to that, /vw/ seems like "child's play" which is a
> perfect segway to the next quote, I must say...
>
> >With small children, L and R often comes out as W (with wots of wip
> >wounding). I wonder if this has acted as a contraint on such sounds
> >arising.
>
> Due to the factus ad supra, methinks nej.