From: Mate Kapovic
Message: 33241
Date: 2004-06-15
----- Original Message -----
From: "Harald Hammarstrom" <haha2581@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 2004 6:47 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Unreality of One-Vowel Systems (was: Bader's article
on *-os(y)o)
> > >> 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
You've seemed to miss my point. I wanted to say - there is not so many
languages which have clics and it could be imagined that all those lgs could
have somehow dissapeared before modern linguistics came about and in that
case we can probably assume that the possibility of phonemic clics would be
rediculed. Unity of Khoisan is the least important thing in what I wanted to
say although I am very well aware of the problems with that subject and I
certainly don't think of them as genetically related.
Mate