Re: Sapir-WhorFreakiness

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.