Re: [tied] Re: Unreality of One-Vowel Systems (was: Bader's article

From: enlil@...
Message: 33263
Date: 2004-06-20

Mate:
> You've seemed to miss my point. I wanted to say - there is not so many
> languages which have clics and it could be imagined that all those lgs
> could have somehow dissapeared before modern linguistics came about and
> in that case we can probably assume that the possibility of phonemic
> clics would be rediculed.

Whether we say that something is exceedingly rare or whether it is
completely non-existent is actually moot. Logically, ingressive sounds
are going to be much less common than plosives for the simple reason that
we don't speak by breathing in. We normally breathe out what we need to
say. We can't speak as well ingressively because our vocal chords just
aren't made that way. Common sense.

So in relation to one-vowel systems, that is, _true_ one-vowel systems,
even if we finally found a language with such a thing defying all odds,
it wouldn't matter. One to two dimensional contrasts appear to be by
far the most common amongst natural languages. Zero dimensional vowel
systems are still at the very least too rare to speak of in anything
but a very theoretical context.


= gLeN