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Re: Sapir-WhorFreakiness

From:Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
Date:Saturday, August 21, 2004, 1:23
Andreas Johansson wrote:
[Pirahã]
> Wonderful allophonics, BTW. [n] and [g] as allophones of the same sound is > almost too good to be true. Given that /b/ has an allophone /m/, one > wonders if > there used to be an /d/ phoneme that merged with /g/. >
Possible, but more likely IMO is that [g] had a [N] allophone that got pulled forward to [n] preceding the front vowel......
> Less freaky, but the language is also one with different phonemic > inventories > for men and women. How and why do such systems arise? >
Taboos, probably. I recall an Indonesian lang. where s ~ h also alternated between men/women, tho I don't recall which used which.