Piotr wrote
>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/).
I can remember as an undergraduate in Western Australia being told
that Aboriginal languages have no frictives or sibilants at all.
Also
their labial and dental plosives (p:b) and (t:d) are median to the
range found in English, giving English speakers difficulty in saying
which European phoneme is intended. The argument, which I suspect
was
partly racist, was that frictives and sibilants had been eliminated
through centuries of intergenerational hearing difficulties.
Piotr continued
> 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).
John here
There was probably one exception to the rule - the coming of the
Aurignacians 35,000 BCE was sufficiently rapid, and sufficiently
synchronous to have been the result of a single language family if
not
a single tongue. Certainly their cultural assemblage suggests a
degree of cultural uniformity not seen before or since with Homo
sapiens sapiens cultures.
Regards
John