Re: THEORY: small inventories

> On Sun, 20 Jun 1999, Paul Bennett wrote:
>
> > On 20 Jun 99, at 14:47, mathias wrote:
> >
> > Is it just my imagination, but do most if not all small-phoneme-
> > inventory languages belong to isolated islands out in the middle of
> > the ocean? :-)
>
> It is your imagination. Shoshone, a Uto-Aztecan language of the Great
> Basin, has 12 underlying consonantal phonemes (11 if you're speaking
> Gosiute--they've tossed the glottal stop), and 5 (maybe 6) underlying
> vowels.
Any good references for the Shoshoni language (inexpensive
if possible)?  I want to make a conlang based on my ancestral
background (mostly French, but going back to Norse as well).
To my knowledge I have only one Shoshoni ancestor, but I think
that would be interesting to mix in with the European languages.
I've found very little on the net. Does it have a syllabary? I've
looked at the one for Cree and it looks pretty cool.

Etherman