Although I tend to agree with the gist of your posting, Piotr, (relevant
bits below) it's worth pointing out that a phoneme total of 58 is not far
above that of modern English (48 - 51 in my speech, depending how you
count). English admittedly has fewer consonants and more vowels, but 58 is
not in itself impossible, surely? There may be excellent reasons in
historical linguistics to make us suspicious of this particular 58-phoneme
reconstruction of a proto-language, but the argument that 58 is unlikely
when daughter languages have fewer does not seem a persuasive one to me.
I am suspicious of this reconstruction for different reasons - I do not
think the 58 are justified by the evidence - but what do I know?
Peter
Your posting:
>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
...
>The phoneme inventory is twice the average size of PIE reconstructions and
nearly three times as big as the standard Proto-Uralic, Proto-Altaic and
Proto-Dravidian systems. Even typical Kartvelian and Afro-Asiatic systems
are far less baroque ...etc..
>The postulation of a parent system so much more complex than any of its
daughters raises the suspicion that protosegments have been artificially
multiplied in order to obtain a satisfactory number of matches. ...