Re: Labial zones (and some info on my lang)

On Mon, 13 Sep 1999, Ed Heil wrote:

> Though of languages which have only one bilabial, it's often "b"
> rather than "p" -- e.g. Arabic) (unlike other places of articulation
> where the unvoiced is more common -- t rather than d and so on).
>
Yes, that's why I added /b/ - I guess that in those cases where there's
/b/ but not /p/, the voice-voiceless distinction isn't phonemic. I was
interested by the mention of languages that have only nasal labials (/m/
etc.) - is this on the surface, or someone's analysis of a kind of deep
structure, like the frequent attempts at analysiing all the vowels in
a language away?

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://denden.conlang.org/~bsarempt