Re: The Monovocalic PIE Myth (was Germans have no /w/, ...)

On Tue, 08 Jun 2004 17:39:35 -0500, Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
wrote:

> I
> suspect that, if we could somehow learn everything about every
> language's history, we'd find that they all have periods of large
> numbers of phonemes, and periods of small numbersof phonemes.
I don't know if I agree with this. I've noticed (informally) that there
seems to be a correlation between how physically isolated a language is
and the paucity of the phoneme inventory.

For instance, the languages of the Pacific, with generally small
inventories (except in language-rich areas), compared to the Caucasian
languages, or those of southern Africa.




Paul