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

> > > >> I am definitely with Jens here... Monovocalic theory cannot be
> excluded
> > > on
> > > >> typological grounds since some languages *can* (even if it is only a
> > > >> possibility) be analyzed like that and also there is the standard
> > > example -
> > > >> if all the Khoisan languages died out before linguists came there, I
> bet
> > > 99%
> > > >> of all linguists would swear that phonemic clics are absolutely
> > > impossibile.
> > >
> > > >Piotr mentioned something and I can elaborate a bit. Khoisan is NOT a
> > > >genetic unity in the sense of Indo-European.
> > >
> > > And who said it was?
> >
> > I hope I haven't said that anyone said Khoisan was a genetic unity ;-)
> > But if someone says "if all Khoisan languages died out before linguistics
> > cam there, then feature X only found in Khoisan would have seemed
> > unattested" it's kind of trivial if there's no definining Khoisan except
> > that feature X. Khoisan cannot be defined in terms of typology, clicks or
> > genetic unity. And the area in Africa from the southernmost Khoisan
> language to
> > the Northernmost would span some 300-600 non-Khoisan languages as well.
> > mvh Harald
>
> 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. Unity of Khoisan is the least important thing in what I wanted to
> say although I am very well aware of the problems with that subject and I
> certainly don't think of them as genetically related.

No, you missed my point - there are many documented languages with clicks,
say about 50, beloning to at least 8 different genetic families, so this
is a bad example of the point you wish to make. What you are saying
amounts to something like "if we lump together all the non-bantu,
non-cushitic click languages of sub-Saharan Africa under a label Z.
Then we ignore the click language(s) of Bantu, Cushitic and Australia and
say: if all Z languages happened to die out before modern linguistics etc".
Don't you see how this is epistemologically vacuous?

There are other phoneme types that are much rarer than clicks, and of
course many other features that are much rarer.

/Harald