> I find it very interesting that both Polish and Arabic lack /e/ and /o/.
> Although why the graph marked Mandarin as lacking /i/ I have no idea.
> /Beijing/ again, anyone?
Weird. I know there are areas of controversy regarding the Mandarin
phonemic inventory (e.g. the phonemic status of the series written |x|,
|j| and |q| in Pinyin which occur only before [i] or [y]) and of the
phonemic status [j] and [w]) - but an analysis that does not give
phonemic status to /i/ seems to me somewhat perverse.
OK - I see that the third element in _bei_ might be regarded as /j/, but
what about the |i| in _jing_? A vocalization of /j/ or what? As I say:
weird.
[snip]
>> On Sat, Sep 6, 2008 at 10:17 PM, Alex Fink <000024@...> wrote:
>>> On Sat, 6 Sep 2008 17:46:14 -0400, Logan Kearsley <
>> chronosurfer@GMAIL.COM>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I used to have an IPA table that included the frequency of each phone
>>>> among world languages- which phones occur in 90% of all languages,
>>>> which phones occur in 80% of languages, which phones occur in only 5%
>>>> of languages, etc. But I seem to have lost it, and I can't find
>>>> anything like that on line. Anybody know where I could get a table or
>>>> a list with frequencies for different phones among world languages?
>>> Wouldn't you know it, I was _just_ looking for the very same thing.
>> UPSID
>>> (the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database) does nearly exactly
>> this,
>>> and there's an interface to it at
>>>
http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid.html .