Re: Revised Eastern Vowel Orthography

FFlores wrote:

>Also, /P/ and /f/ are not very distinct... more or less
>the same as with /h/ and /x/ (which someone once said that
>were found contrasting in any natlang).
I can't think of a single natlang example of phonemic distinction of /P/ and
/f/.  The former isn't that common; it's found in languages like Japanese
and Uzbek, but the vast majority has the latter only.  They are a little
distinct, if the ear is trained well, so it's theoretically possible to have
both...

However, contrast of /h/ and /x/ is more common.  You have both phonemes in
Irish and Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Scots English, Dutch, German, Czech,
Ukrainian (the /h/ is voiced in that language), Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic,
Somali, Azeri, Turkmen, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar-Bashkir, Uzbek (where /x/ is
uvular), Uyghur, Kalmyk-Oirat, Persian, Kurdish, Pashto, Urdu, Kashmiri,
Hmong and (I think) Vietnamese.  Of course many languages have one but not
the other: English, Hungarian, Turkish, and Japanese only have /h/; Spanish,
Russian, Khalkha Mongolian and Mandarin Chinese only have /x/.

Danny


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