Re: Q (Caucasian Elf)
| From: | Herman Miller <hmiller@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, February 25, 2001, 3:18 |
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On Sat, 24 Feb 2001 17:19:38 -0600, Danny Wier <dawier@...> wrote:
>Actually, the language with the most consonants is !Xu~, a Khoisan language,
>with 95. But 48 of them are clicks, leaving 47 non-clicks. The UPSID list
>of largest consonant inventories of living languages (Ubykh is now extinct),
>from Larry Trask in an article on Basque and Nostratic:
>
>1) !Xu~ (Khoisan) 95
>2) Lak (North Caucasian) 60
>3) one dialect of Arabic (Afro-Asiatic) 56
>4) Panjabi (Indo-European > Indo-Aryan) 59
>5) Kabardian (North Caucasian) 48
>6) Haida (Na-Dene) 46
>7) Nazahua (?) 45
> Shilha (Afro-Asiatic) 45
>9) Irish Gaelic (Indo-European > Celtic) 6
>10) Igbo (Niger-Congo) 43
> Tlingit (Na-Dene) 43
>12) Sui 42
>13) Otomi 41
>14) Hindi-Urdu (Indo-European) 40
Irish Gaelic? That doesn't seem right. I know it's got 2 versions of most
consonants (palatalized and velarized), and 3 of some, but I can't see how
you'd get more than 35 or so in all. I wonder why Sindhi isn't on the list.
As far as my conlangs, Olaetian has up to 43 consonant phonemes in some
dialects. But this comes from having "grown" over the years. Since Olaetian
was my first lang, I had a tendency to add new sounds and features to it
rather than creating a new language for them.
--
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