Insanely many phonemes (was Re: Tonal inflection?)
| From: | Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, August 30, 2008, 16:42 |
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Hallo!
On Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:13:18 -0400, John Vertical wrote:
> I tried constructing a "maximal" phoneme inventory a while ago, too. I had a
> few thousand non-click consonants defined before abandoning the thought.
>
> The 144 labial stops, for example, were constructed as
> {bilabial stop, labiodental affricate} * {plain, prenasalized} * {plain,
> palatalized} * {plain, labialized} * {voiced, prevoiced, unvoiced} * {plain,
> aspirated, glottalized}. A maximally horrendous example phoneme might be
> /mbf_>_j_w/.
144 LABIAL STOPS!?! Jeepers Creepers! Not even Danny Wier would
dare that in his best days :) This way, you could indeed come up
with more than 1000 consonants, and implement Speedtalk with
not-too-restricted set of roots. (An idea to pursue in X-3, my
speedtalk-type engelang, though.)
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