From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 2788
Date: 2000-07-08
----- Original Message -----From: John CroftSent: Saturday, July 08, 2000 12:31 PMSubject: [TIED] Re: KhoisanidJohn writes:I can remember a story of how Noam Chomsky claimed that there was one
possible human phoneme that was found in no human language, until at
an international cnference on the subject, he was refuted by one young
Papua New Guinean linguist who showed that such a phoneme was indeed
found in the Papua New Guinean Highlands).
The sound in question is a voiced velar lateral affricate, if anyone's curious what it might be. It occurs in some of the Chimbu languages of the Central Highlands. Talking of anomalies, Rotokas, spoken in Bougainville (the Solomons), has no nasal phonemes (all it reportedly has, BTW, is five vowels /a, e, i, o, u/ and six consonants /p, b, t, r, k, g/).
There are a number of factors that contribute to language loss. For
instance, it would appear that a major historical factor has been the
formation of states. For example, pre-Roman Italy had a linguistic
diversity that was almost Papua New Guinean. There were four very
different languages in Scicily alone. Sardinia seems to have had
three. Spain was similar. It was the rise of states that led to the
end of this linguistic diversity, everywhere. One finds traces of it
in odd ways. China for instance had whole language families, vaguely
mentioned by name in Chou times that have wholly disappeared.
I suppose pre-IE Europe was not unlike native North America -- three or four dozen small independent families plus some lingering isolates. Vennemann's Proto-Vasconic Northern Europe is an absurd idea (so is any other scenario assuming the conquest of a continent by a single pre-Neolithic speech community).Piotr