Re: Revised Eastern Vowel Orthography

Danny Wier wrote:

>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...
Several languages of West Africa are said to have such phonemic
contrasts. Below are some Ewe examples which Ladefoged and Maddieson
lists in their book "The Sounds of the World's Languages" (I left
out the tone marks for fear of it being mucked up via email):

/ePa/ "he polished"          /efa/ "he was cold"
/EBE/ "the Ewe language"     /EvE/ "two"
/ePle/ "he bought"           /efle/ "he split off"
/eBlo/ "mushroom"            /evlo/ "he is evil"

>
>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/.
Many Semitic languages (e.g., Arabic, Hebrew, and Maltese) contrast
pharyngeal fricatives with glottal. And those are afterall produced
with points of articulations that are closer together than velar
versus glottal.

Ladefoged and Maddieson also cites an example of a language that
makes a phonemic distinction between fricatives with POAs that are
even closer together than pharyngeal versus glottal. The Burkikhan
dialect og Agul is said to make a phonemic distinction between stops
and fricatives produced at the velar, pharyngeal, epiglottal, and
glottal areas. That is a lot of phonemic sounds produced at
different places at the throat! To that I have to say: Wow!!!

Even though some sounds are produced at points of articulations that
are very close to each other, they can still apparently contrast in
natlangs.

-kristian- 8-)