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

Oooh, missed Welsh --my ancestor Gruffudd ap Llewelyn
will never forgive me.
I suppose it also existed in early Gaelic and perhaps
long ago in some variety of N. French e.g. "faith" <
Latin fides
But is /T/ essentially a transitory phoneme? --if one
can say that, i.e. one that normally only exists for a
short period of time? English has had it since the
days of Gmc but most other Gmc languages have lost it.
Modern Hebrew and most dialects of modern Arabic have
lost it. In Ibero-Romance, it's limited to N Spain,
where I think it crosses over to Galician and I don't
know about Asturian or Aragonese or if any arcane
forms of Catalan have it.
The Arabic emphatics are often said to be extremely
rare, especially emphatic /d./ but mainly by people
who teach Arabic. Is this so? Does 'ayn exists outside
Semitic or AA? It once existed in Hebrew and I can
only guess that it exists in Aramaic, since it's
mainly a relic language surrounded by Arabic

--- Richard Wordingham <richard@...>
wrote:

> --- 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.
>
>

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