Re: help! phonology...& addendum

On Tue, 24 Oct 2000, Herman Miller wrote:

> I've always had the impression that fricatives tend to be more common than
> stops. English is an obvious example, but also look at Arabic. I suppose
> you could consider uvular and pharyngeal as corresponding in some way, but
> Arabic also has /T s S/ (like English), while there's only one stop /t/ in
> the same area (not counting the emphatic versions, which include both stops
> and fricatives).
Your comment made me curious, because I had always had the opposite
impression. I looked up 16 language that I had on my shelf (I didn't check
all my references though). Here are my results:

Eyak: 14 stops, 7 frics
Tlingit: 19 stops, 15 frics
Haida: 25 stops, 8 frics
Tsimshian: 19 stops, 4 frics
Kwakwala: 21 cons, 5 frics
Salishan (generally): 13 stops, 7 frics
Pima: 8 stops, 5 frics
Ainu: 4 stops, 2 frics
Hawaiian: 3 stops, 1 fric
Finnish: 5 stops, 3 frics
Comanche: 5 stops, 2 frics
Chickasaw: 4 stops, 5 frics
Yoeme: 5 stops, 3 frics
Quechua: 4 stops, 4 frics
Navajo: 8 stops, 12 frics
Japanese: 6 stops, 2 frics

Conclusion: If anything, there seem to be more stops than fricatives. Now,
admittedly my sample is skewed because most of them are Native
American languages spoken on the western half of the continent. But what
can I say, I'm an Americanist and this is what I had handy. If we were to
extend this further, I suspect the same pattern would be found. Hawaiian
is a typical Oceanic language, and the Austronesian languages are famous
for not having any fricatives at all.

Marcus Smith