CHAT: Rare Phonetics
| From: | Danny Wier <dawier@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, June 22, 2001, 2:53 |
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This is an interest of mine, as most of yas know. It's from a PDF document I
found on languages that can be distinguished from others by the occurence of
consonants and/or vowels not found in other languages. 451 languages are listed
in the document.
Some examples:
Breton: some diphthongs: [Eo], [E~O~] (nasal), [aE], [a~O~] (also nasal)
Bulgarian: palatized apical dental sibilant affricate [t[s[j]
Burmese: the nasal diphthong [o~u~]
Chuvash: ultrashort front mid-high rounded vowel [o/(]
French: nasal front mid-low rounded vowel [oe~]
Hmong: the diphthong [EM] and the prenasals [Nkh], [Nq], [Nqh], [n.t.s.],
[n[t[s[h], [ntSh]
Igbo: palatized non-rhotic tap [rj], breathy-voiced [b:jh] and [g:w]
Irish Gaelic: [Bj], [F~w] (~ = velarized), [b~w], [m~w], [n~], [p~wh], [r~]
Kashmiri: [@~:], [dZj], [i-~:] (long nasal barred i), [tSj]
Khalkha Mongolian: [Ui] *a favorite diphthong of mine!
Khmer: [e@], [M:] (M is supposed to be the high back unrounded vowel)
Korean: [s[~] (pharyngealized apical sibilant)
Malagasy: [d.r?], [t.r?] (rhotacized and glottalized retroflex stops, I think)
Mandarin: [cCh] (palatal affricate)
Neo-Aramaic: [i6:], [u6:] (pharyngealized long vowels)
Norwegian: [aeu-] (ae-barred u diphthong), [o/y] (slashed o-y), [u-:] (long
barred u-)
Romanian: [ea]
Russian: [S~], [Z~] (pharyngealized postalveolars)
Somali: [U-] (lax version of barred u), [d.~] (velarized retroflex d.)
Uzbek: [B~] (velarized voiced bilabial fricative)
Vietnamese: [iV], [uV], [MV] (V = inverted v, the mid-open back unrounded vowel)
Zulu: [ls] (sibilantized l), [kL'] (lateralized velar ejective?)
The language with the most unique phones is !Xou, with 65.
~DaW~
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