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. Not quite as small as Hawaiian or Rotokas, but small enough. The
underlying inventory is:

        p       t       ts      k       kw      (?)
                        s                       h
        m       n
                        y               w

        i       i-      u
        (e)             o
                a

The Iroquoian languages have rather small inventories. Mohawk, for
example, has 10 consonants and 5 vowels (at least according to the
analyses presented by Paul Postal in the mid 60s):

        p       t       k       ?
                s               h
                n
                r
        w       y

        i
        e       ^       o
                a

Kuna, a language of Central America, also has 10 consonants and 5
vowels:

        p       t       C       k       kw
                s
        m       n
        w       l

        i               u
        e               o
                a

> Counterexamples (tunu?), if you please.  Also, if anyone feels like
> it, theories/arguements as to why this is.  (Lack of contact with
> other languages with which to compare and contrast phonemes?)
I don't think that there is any a priori reason why some languages
should have small segmental inventories. What is more curious to me is
why languages like Shoshone should derive such large surface inventories
from their relatively impoverished underlying stock (Gosiute has, by my
count, between 37 and 40 surface phones; over three times the number in
its underlying inventory), while the inventories of languages like
Hawaiian show such stability and resistance to phonological "diddling."

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu                   "All grammars leak."
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~elzinga/                 -Edward Sapir