Re: [tied] Re: Fricative-less languages?

On 2006-07-23 21:23, Richard Wordingham wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...> wrote:
>> A question arising out of mere curiosity: Recognizing that IE had
> but a single fricative, /s/, I wonder whether there are any existing
> or former languages that have no fricatives at all. Does anyone know
> any such examples?
>
> Auca, Maxakalí, Iate (Yate), Dera, Angaatiha, and Ekari lack
> (phonemic) continuant consonants - i.e. no fricatives.
>
> In the UPSID survey of 317 languages, 7% had no fricative *phonemes*
> and 12% had only one.

The vast majority of the Australian languages have no fricatives or
affricates at all. It's one of the most famous areal features of the
continent. What's really interesting, in the few cases where some of
them have acquired fricatives through the lenition of stops, the new
acquisitions are almost always non-sibilants like /B, D, G/ (or a subset
thereof). There are even languages that have /D/ or /G/ as the only
fricative, thus falsifying a couple of "absolute implicational
universals" at one time. Kala Lagaw Ya and Meriam, spoken on the Torres
Strait Islands, are pretty exceptional in having /s/ and /z/, but they
belong to the Papuan sprachbund in this respect.

Piotr