Re: Language "laws"?
| From: | Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, October 12, 2004, 6:05 |
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On Monday, October 11, 2004, at 06:43 , Joe wrote:
> Pascal A. Kramm wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 08:37:53 -0400, Yann Kiraly <yann_kiraly@...>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Is it possible for a conlang to have k,t,d,g,b but no p? And can it lack
>>> s,z,f,v,w and have th?
It possible for a _conlang_ to have practically anything :)
>>> Because, so far mine has these features. Also, I
>>> wanted to ask about the IPA signs for the following vowels:
>>> ö,ü,schwa,a in saw and for the consonant j as in jump.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> It's highly unlikely for a language to have a voiced consonant (like b)
>> but
>> not its unvoiced equivalent (p). So you'd better off with a lacking b.
Nah - /b/ without /p/ is OK - see below.
> I can think of a counterexample to that immediately. Old Irish.
> Admittedly, there were a small number of <p>s, but they were all borrowed.
An even better counter example is Arabic, spoken by some 120 000 or more
people in the modern world. It certainly has /b/ but no /p/ at all.
I can think of languages that have /s/ but no other fricatives; but I
cannot think of any with just /T/. However, I don't see why at some stage
a lonely [s] could not have changed to [T] (maybe a monarch or ruler had a
lisp, and courtiers/followers/sycophants copied him/her and then it became
a mark of 'polite speech' and so eventually spread to all layers of
society) - in fact I would not be unduly surprised if a language were
found with /T/ as its only fricative.
Ray
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