Re: Phonemic vowel and consonant length.

From: "Joe" <joe@...>

| Absolutly not.  I mean, look at Ubykh. It has 2(3?) vowels, and around 80
| consonants.

There's a set of recordings of Ubyx's last speaker, Tevfik Esenç, who died in
Istanbul in 1992, taking his language with him. I'd love to find those. There
are 82 consonants and 3 vowels, in fact. The large number of consonants is a
result of phonemic pharyngealization (I think), indicated by an underlined
letter. This in addition to other features such as palatization, labialization
and glottalization. If you can read .pdf files, the alphabet is listed at
http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/ubykh.pdf.