Ed Heil <edheil@...> wrote:
> David Crystal's fun & interesting _Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language_
> has a section which might be of interest to anyone who wonders how
> "typical" language phonologies look. For those of us without a
> linguistics degree, and a wide exposure to the different permutations
> and combinations of sounds in languages, this kind of question comes
> up.
>
> This is a transcription of some notes I took on Crystal's report on
> the UPSID language survey, a database of phoneme inventories from a
> sample of 317 languages from a wide variety of language families and
> areas.
/snip/
Very useful data indeed. Thanks!
>
> A nasal at an articulatory location implies a stop at the same
> location.
Does Crystal put together affricates with stops? Spanish has /n^/
but no palatal stops, though it does have /tS/.
> 86% of /r/-like consonants are trills, taps, or flaps.
What's the difference between a tap and a flap? I thought
they were the same!
--Pablo Flores