Re: [tied] IS's "regular roots"

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 5830
Date: 2001-01-28

Depending also how you analyse long vowels and diphthongs. A biphonemic analysis would greatly reduce the inventory -- it's the vowels that inflate it. There are languages like !Xu~ with about eighty click types, but here again it isn't clear to me whether all clicks should be treated as unitary phonemes (rather than clusters). If there is disagreement about how to analyse well-known modern languages (including English), perhaps we shouldn't worry so much about the exact number of phonemes in Nostratic. But here's the rub: if you posit a very large inventory, phonemes have to share the comparative evidence and are not likely to be individually well supported by reliable correspondences.
 
Piotr
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: petegray
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, January 28, 2001 4:10 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] IS's "regular roots"

...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?