Re: Too Many Too Little Possible Roots!!!

Kristian Jensen wrote:
> Below are some examples of natlangs that appear to reflect this:
>
> Why has Chinese become tonal for instance? One reason could be that
> since roots are predominantly monosyllabic and simple in structure,
> tones would have to arise to compensate for a lack of phonemic
> opposition in words (i.e., to decrease the number of homophones).
> But say Chinese developed into a language with polysyllables, then
> the tonal contrasts would not be necessary. In fact, Mandarin
> Chinese with only four contrastive tones has quite a few
> polysyllabic roots. Other Chinese dialects with more than four tones
> are more monosyllabic than Mandarin. Basically, these changes
> attempt to preserve the number of possible roots.
Very interesting theory. However, am I correct in thinking that
Cantonese has something like 8 tones *and* allows more final
consonants than Mandarin?