Transliteration and interpretation issues

[Koen G]

I once heard, but Koen is the expert who can confirm/reject, that vowels are "recent" developments of human speech capabilities, and primitive languages did not have them. This would be leftovers of that, or more accurately, the sounds of "l" and "r" were originally equivalent to vowels.

These are syllabic consonants: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Some consonant clearly have more body to them than others. A common example I remember is the British English pronunciation "bottle", which has what sounds like a really thick "l" as the second syllable. In English, as opposed to Czech, this is not immediately obvious in writing.

I would be careful connecting any hypothesized or reconstructed features of early language to properties of modern languages. We can reconstruct up to proto-Indo-European with some accuracy, but this is still a modern language, part of the top of the pyramid. The kinds of hypotheses you are talking about are situated at the bottom of the pyramid, and we know absolutely nothing about everything that's in between.

The best way of thinking about what is actually happening is to see consonants as a scale, some consonants are more vowel-like than others. Take the example of our "l": it is voiced (i.e. when you pronounce it, your vocal cords vibrate) and you can lengthen it at will, both properties of vowels. What distinguishes it from a full vowel is that the air does not move "relatively unhindered" through the mouth. But the sound can perfectly end up taking the role of a vowel in syllables.