Re: [tied] Re: Unreality of One-Vowel Systems (was: Bader's article

> >> I am definitely with Jens here... Monovocalic theory cannot be excluded
> on
> >> typological grounds since some languages *can* (even if it is only a
> >> possibility) be analyzed like that and also there is the standard
> example -
> >> if all the Khoisan languages died out before linguists came there, I bet
> 99%
> >> of all linguists would swear that phonemic clics are absolutely
> impossibile.
>
> >Piotr mentioned something and I can elaborate a bit. Khoisan is NOT a
> >genetic unity in the sense of Indo-European.
>
> And who said it was?

I hope I haven't said that anyone said Khoisan was a genetic unity ;-)
But if someone says "if all Khoisan languages died out before linguistics
cam there, then feature X only found in Khoisan would have seemed
unattested" it's kind of trivial if there's no definining Khoisan except
that feature X. Khoisan cannot be defined in terms of typology, clicks or
genetic unity. And the area in Africa from the southernmost Khoisan language to
the Northernmost would span some 300-600 non-Khoisan languages as well.
mvh Harald