Re: Underused phonemes

Peter Bleackley, On 13/01/2006 09:24:
> It occurred to me yesterday that I don't know of any conlangs that have
> [W] as a phoneme.
You can't tell purely from a phoneme inventory whether [W] occurs in the conlang.
For instance, Livagian lacks /W/, but has [W] as a realization of /hu/ -- i.e.
like English (for those dialects that have [W]).

> I was wondering what other sounds people might think worthy of more exposure.
Somebody with spare time on their hands should do a Conlang poll that solicits and
collates lists in CXS notation of all phones that occur contrastively in a
given conlang. Ideally, the poll would be one of those automated online ones,
else collating the results'd be murder (unless somebody writes a perl script or
suchlike to do it). Alas, this exercise is beyond the limits of my competence
and free time.

Livagian, for example, has 24 segmental phonemes plus 3 tones, and 59 mutually
contrastive phones (factoring out tonal contrasts).

--And.

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