Re: !Ui phonemes
| From: | Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, October 22, 2002, 18:14 |
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Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> An article in the Oct 19th-25th issue of The Economist (page 48) mentions a
> Khoisan language called "!Ui" as having 140+ phonemes, which's rather more
> than the ~110 I've heard for other Khoisan languages.
I assume that's another name for !Xu~, which does have 141 phonemes.
> Also the article claims that spoken languages "usually" employ around twenty
> phonemes - is this correct?
I believe it's slightly higher. Okay, according to The Cambridge
Encyclopedia of Language, 70% of the world's languages have between 20
and 37 phonemes.
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