large vowel inventories [was: Re: tlhn'ks't, ngghlyam'ft, etc]

At 10:40 AM +0100 2/5/03, daniel andreasson wrote:
>Danny Wier wrote:
>
>> !Xu~ 95 (48 clicks)
>> Lak 60
>> an unidentified variety of Arabic 56
>
>8<-- snip rest of list of most consonants -->8
>
>Does anyone have a similar list of languages with the
>most vowels? I know about that site which describes
>different vowel systems, and it ranks Swedish among
>the highest with like 19 vowels (even though phonemically
>it's just nine). Surely there must be languages with
>more vowels than that? Or do you have to resort to long/
>short/overlong, nasalized, pharyngealization, et al. to
>beat that?
Geleen Limburgian has 11 short vowels with corresponding long vowels and 8
diphthongs, all of which seem to be phonemic (chart in Strict X-SAMPA; best
viewed in a monowidth font):

i       y       u               i:      y:      u:
                                i{      y&/2&   o6
e       2       o               e:      2:      o:
                                Ei      9y      Ou
E_r     9_r     O_r             E:      9:      O:
{               A               {i              Au
                                           a:

(source: Boersma, Paul. 1998. Functional Phonology; p 349).

So I guess that beats Swedish.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson