Re: CHAT: minimum phonemes, was Re: vrindo

Paul Bennett wrote:

> Is it just my imagination, but do most if not all small-phoneme-
> inventory languages belong to isolated islands out in the middle of
> the ocean? :-)
>
> Counterexamples (tunu?), if you please.  Also, if anyone feels like
> it, theories/arguements as to why this is.  (Lack of contact with
> other languages with which to compare and contrast phonemes?)
My most successful conlanging attempt was to create a language that
was referred to in the roleplaying game 'Talislanta' -- Chanan, the
language of several jungle and island tribes.

I didn't set out to make a minimal phoneme language; I simply took
the existing Chanan words and made a phonology to fit them.  I was
able to create relationships between existing words (e.g. the 'ba' in
'batre' was the same as the 'pa' in 'panaku' and the 'fa' in 'fahn',
all the names of islands; 'pa' would then mean 'island' and the
language would be head-first).  In the process, I eliminated most of
the differences between phonemes and ended up with a tiny inventory:

Consonants: p, t, tS, k, m, n, l, r, w
 (yes, that's right, no fricatives at all)
Vowels: a e u

The real fun was that in one of the dialects, Sawilan, all the stops
become fricatives, so it is a completely stopless language.  Doesn't
sound all that strange -- I posted a Sawilan poem a while back, called
'Sila samu i.'

But yes, a large number of Chanan speakers are islanders in an area
of Talislanta based very loosely on the South Pacific. :)

+ Ed Heil ---------------------- edheil@postmark.net +
|    "What matter that you understood no word!       |
|    Doubtless I spoke or sang what I had heard      |
|           In broken sentences."  --Yeats           |
+----------------------------------------------------+