Re: Pharingials, /l/ vs. /r/ in Southeast Asia

Trebor wrote:

  >What are pharingial vowels or consonants?

 >Does Chinese have /l/ or /r/, or both? It's claimed that Old Volapük has no
/r/ because it's hard for Chinese people to pronounce, but I've seen <rén>
given as a Chinese word.

 Others will no doubt answer these. But AFAIK, the r in romanized Chinese
represents a retroflexed z or Z-like sound, and isn't considered a rhotic.
<ren> used to be written <jen> in an older system, and shows up in Japanese as
<jin> as in gaijin 'foreigner'.

   
  >Is there a 'liquid trend' in southeast Asia, leaning towards one or the other?

 Perhaps only the languages of the Sino-Tibetan family? Otherwise I don't see
any trend. Vietnamese has both. Not sure, but I think Thai and Khmer do. Of the
Malayo-Polynesian langs. in the area, some in the Philippines merged r and l >
l, but had [r] as an allophone of /d/, then acquired phonemic /r/ from Spanish
and English loans. To my knowledge, all the major languages of Indonesia have
both; but some minor langs. of the Moluccan area have undergone very
complicated partial mergers of the two sounds. My favorite language out there
has r,l,d,n,N all merged > n