vowels are also centralized, and are sometimes referred to by that term. They may also be called obscure, as there is no one-to-one correspondence between full and reduced vowels. Sound duration is a common factor in reduction: In fast speech, vowels are reduced due to physical limitations of the articulatory organs, e.g., the tongue cannot move to a prototypical position fast or completely enough to produce a full-quality vowel (compare with clipping). Different languages have different types of vowel reduction, and this is one of the difficulties in language acquisition (see e.g. Non-native pronunciations of English and Anglophone pronunciation of foreign languages). Vowel reduction of second language speakers is a separate study. Stress-related vowel reduction is a principal factor in the development of Indo-European ablaut, as well as other changes reconstructed by historical linguistics. Vowel reduction is one of the sources of distinction between a spoken language and its written counterpart. Vernacular and formal speech often have different levels of vowel reduction, and so the term "vowel reduction" is also applied to differences in a language variety with respect to, e.g., the language standard. Some languages, such as Finnish, Hindi, and classical Spanish, are claimed to lack vowel reduction. Such languages are often called syllable-timed languages. At the other end of the spectrum, Mexican Spanish is characterized by the reduction or loss of the unstressed vowels, mainly when they are in contact with the sound . It can be the case that the words pesos, pesas, and peces are pronounced the same: . Vowel inventory reduction In some cases phonetic vowel reduction may contribute to phonemic (phonological) reduction, which means merger of phonemes, induced by indistinguishable pronunciation. This sense of vowel reduction may occur by means other than vowel centralisation, however. Many Germanic languages, in their early stages, reduced the number of vowels that could occur in unstressed syllables, without (or before) clearly showing centralisation. Proto-Germanic and its early descendant Gothic still allowed more or less the full complement of vowels and diphthongs to appear in unstressed syllables, except notably short , which merged with . In early Old High German and Old Saxon, this had been reduced to five vowels (i, e, a, o, u, some with length distinction), later reduced further to just three short vowels (i/e, a, o/u). In Old Norse, likewise, only three vowels were written in unstressed syllables: a, i and u (their exact phonetic