On Sat, 27 Jan 2001 00:00:02 +0100, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<
gpiotr@...> wrote:
>The "Slava" system, as revised and recently canvassed by Dolgopolsky, is indeed Gargantuan:
>
>25 stops and affricates (3 rows of eight + glottal stop)
>12 fricatives (2 rows of 5 + pharyngeal and glottal fricatives)
>13 sonorants (5 nasals, 3 laterals, 2 rhotics, 3 semivowels)
>7 vowels
>
>---------------
>
>Total: 57 phonemes, including 50 consonants
I agree this is too much, even if we assume that Afro-Asiatic and
Kartvelian are the phonologically most conservative branches. My
point was simply that one cannot have a simple phoneme inventory (say,
5 vowels and 20 consonants) and at the same time CVC roots (20*5*20
makes 2,000 roots or less, which is clearly insufficient). I also
objected to the dismissal of Illich-Svitych's work simply because (a)
he's dead and (b) one doesn't understand his notation.
A problem which may be partially responsible for the proliferation of
proto-phonemes in Nostratic (and other large time-depth proposals) is
that when confronted with a set of correspondences like:
Lang 1 Lang 2
A B
A C,
the easiest reconstruction to make is *B, *C, with merger to A in
Language 1. To reconstruct *A, with split into B and C in Language 2,
one needs to know what the conditions of the split were, and, when
dealing with large time-depths, such information is more likely to
have been irretrievably lost. This makes *B *C not only the easiest,
but in fact the only possible reconstruction, given the information
that we have.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...