Re: Tit'xka (Pretty Long Post)

Steg Belsky wrote:
> Well, i seem to remember a language which died out a few years ago (but
> was heavily documented by scientists, linguists, etc. and its last
> speaker) which had many many many phonemicly different consonants, and
> only one vowel - i think it was /a/ .  If i remember correctly, it was
> from the Caucasus region.
I'd heard about those langs having very few vowels, but I don't think
that any of them only had one.  I remember reading that a few might've
had 2 vowel phonemes, but it was debated whether one of those was
actually 2, that is, whether or not they were predictable variations.  I
don't know why it was so controversial, tho.  But I've never heard of
any even being claimed to have only one vowel phoneme.