Re: Brr (was: Re: A few questions about linguistics concerning my new project)

Quoting Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>:

> On 8/2/07, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> > Mark J. Reed writes:
> > > in parts of Greenland the /u/ phoneme seems to be merging into /i/.
> >
> > Fascinating.  Do you have some pointers for further reading?  A
> > two-vowel system of /1/ vs. /a/ would be very interesting.
>
> I read somewhere about a natlang whose (phonemic) vowels seemed to be
> distinguished only by height (and not by backness; don't remember
> about rounding). Such a lang could conceivably have phonemic /1/ vs
> /a/ (though phonetically, I don't know what the allophonic range could
> be -- conceivably rather wide).
I remember reading that some Caucasian language (Ubykh?) arguably has only two
vowel phonemes, notated as /a/ and /@/, each with a large number of
phonotactically determined allophones.

                         Andreas