First, welcome, Reiner.

A couple of observations:

Consider the many monosyllabic words in the American English language.

This should hold true for British English as well as the Australian, etc. varieties.

I'd say that any comparison would leave out English's idiosyncratic spelling system and use a phonemic transcription.

A look at the suffixes is also interesting.

This is not what I think of when I read the word suffix. A suffix is an affix (i.e., prefix, infix, circumfix, or suffix) that when added to the end of a (root) word, changes its meaning. For example, -s (plural morpheme), -s third person singular present), -ly (change an adjective into an adverb), etc. In linguistics, one can use the terms onset, nucleus, and coda for (roughly) the consonantal beginning, middle, and end of a syllable (see link). An example: of the two possible and meaningful English monosyllabic words clasp /klęsp/ and clasped /klęspt/, only the -ed /t/ is what most would call a suffix.

The linguistic might differentiate between the sounds for oal, ole, and oul.

A linguist (or phonologist) would say that most syllables ending in -oal (goal, foal), -ole (vole), and -oul (soul), as well as -oll (toll) are rhymes and end in the same sound, i.e., /ol/.

Someone should try this in French, Spanish, or German to see if any parallels are worth noting. My hunch is that English wins any comparison of its monosyllabic words.

The phonotactics (link) of Spanish, pretty much disallow most of the combinations of phonemes in this manner. You might have a better time with German (or Germanic languages), Russian, Mandarin, etc. My hunch is that English and German would be quite similar. Russian allows some interesting onsets that English phonotactics disallow: e.g., кто /kto/ 'who', что /ʃto/ 'what'. The Caucasian languages (e.g., Georgian, Abkhazian, Chechen) might also be a good place to look.

As you point out, not all syllables which are combinations of the English phonemic inventory and which are allowed by English phonotactics are actual words in English: i.e., while fash and glang are possible English monosyllabic words, tlaszp is not a possible English word.


Ceci n'est pas un seing.