En réponse à Danny Wier <dawier@...>:
>
> Some examples:
>
> Breton: some diphthongs: [Eo], [E~O~] (nasal), [aE], [a~O~] (also
> nasal)
Old French had some nice nasal diphtongues too :) .
> French: nasal front mid-low rounded vowel [oe~]
And don't forget the dreaded /H/ (inverted lowercase h, the non-vocalic
equivalent of /y/) which exists in only a handful of languages all over the
world.
> Somali: [U-] (lax version of barred u), [d.~] (velarized retroflex d.)
Can you *produce* such a thing?!
> Uzbek: [B~] (velarized voiced bilabial fricative)
A fricative correspondant of the labiovelar /w/?
>
> The language with the most unique phones is !Xou, with 65.
>
I wish I could hear some of this language one day. I think at the Cité de la
Science, in Paris, there is a whole part about language where you can listen to
samples of a lot of languages, and this language was part of them (IIRC) as an
example of a language with clicks. Unfortunately, the loudspeaker that was
supposed to give those samples seemed to be broken :((( . I wonder how you can
actually put clicks in words...
Christophe.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr