Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Question about UPSID and the *natlang* with over 200 phonemes

From:Danny Wier <dawiertx@...>
Date:Monday, March 8, 2004, 7:59
Referring to this URL:

http://www.langmaker.com/db/ups_index_phonemeinventory.htm

It's a list of languages ranked from lowest to highest in terms of number of
total consonant and vowel phonemes. Unsurprisingly, Mura and Rotokas came in
with 9, followed by Hawaiian and Nasioi with 11 (but I thought Hawaiian had
18, if you count long vowels and the glottal stop)

But what shocked me is the claim that Ga, a Niger-Kordofanian language
spoken in Ghana, has a total of 241! Surpassing Xu by over a hundred even.
The total count: 199 consonants, 42 vowels.

The numbers had to have been padded somewhere. I checked out the stats on
Arabic, and it listed 54 consonants and 8 vowels -- but if you count both
short and long consonants, you would get 28 x 2 = 56 (theoretically) total.
Also ranking high are Lak (N Caucasian) with 111, Punjabi (IE) with 66,
Irish (IE) with 64, and Arabic (AA) and Hindi-Urdu (IE) tied with 62.

I tried to find the results of the UPSID survey -- I thought they were on
UCLA's website -- no luck. Help anyone?