Re: !Ui phonemes

 --- And Rosta <a.rosta@...> wrote: >

<big snip>

>
> It's certainly misleading to describe a language
> with the basic 5
> vowels, in long/short, oral/nasal,
> breathy/creaky/modal versions
> as having a lot of vowels (viz 5 * 2 * 2 * 3 = 60).
> And similarly
> for consonants. We need some different criterion to
> measure the
> phonetic richness of a language (e.g. what
> proportion of the IPA
> chart systematically corresponds to phonetic
> realizations of
> phonological forms in the language in question). I
> guess that
> the languages that win on that score are found in
> the Caucasus
> (and much beloved by Bfowol).
>
hmmm . . .. if you count vowels that way, bac ( which
has 5 cardinals, which can be diphthongised with |y|
/I/ or |w| /U/, and lengthened with |h| or nasalised
with |n| ( |ey| /EI/ is [e]; |uw| /UU/ is [u] &c ) )
should have 45 possible vowels. add ( in correct
speech ) three versions of each of the 13 consonants (
nasalised, lenited and normal ), ie 39 consonant
sounds, and you have an inventory of 84 phonemes ( and
this is before you allow prelenition and
prenasalisation, which, depending on whether you view
them as phonemic, could increase the number further )

that's twice the number in english, yet based on 5
vowels, 13 consonants and four mutations !

bn

=====
bnathyuw | landan | arR
stamp the sunshine out | angelfish
your tears came like anaesthesia | phèdre

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