Re: Can relationships between languages be determined after 80,000 y

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:

>
> Clicks are certainly limited but since they exists as
> phonemes, they need to be taken into account.
> AFAIK -some of the Khoi-San langauges have the
> greatest number of phonemes of any language, so they
> weren't challenged for sounds, like say Hawaiian.
> Besides the South African Sprachbund, Sandawe and
> Hadza, there is supposedly a Cushitic language that
> has clicks and they are used in some Australian
> language for some specialized purpose (men's
> language?).
> Are they related to ingressives or ejectives somehow?
> Besides clicks, what are the other "strange" phonemes
> or phonetic systems?
> Dravidian and Australian have lack of voiced and
> aspirates but fine distinctions between articulation
> points. Is this limited to those 2 groups?

> English /T/ is a rare enough sound --AFAIK only found
> in Europe in English, Icelandic, Faeroese, N. Spanish,
> Albananian and Greek; in Asia in Burmese, Classical
> Arabic; in the Americas in Shawnee and I don't know
> where else.

Also in yr iaith Gymraeg (Welsh), in several Central and Northern Tai
dialects (where it derives from Proto-Tai *s and *z), and as an
alternative to the lateral fricative in Choctaw. (Several of the Tai
languages have this latter alternation - it is an areal tendency of
Southern China.) Also, it is far from unknown for /th/ to have [T] as
an allophone.

A fleeting existence is also not unknown - it is argued for
'Proto-Italic' and an earlier stage of Armenian, and it was once more
widespread in the Semitic languages - Massoretic Hebrew has /T/, which
goes back to Proto-Semitic *t. (The phonemic status was incipient.)

Richard.