From: Patrick Ryan
Message: 52073
Date: 2008-01-30
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rick McCallister" <gabaroo6958@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 5:04 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Can relationships between languages be determined after
80,000 years?
> 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.
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________________________________
> Be a better friend, newshound, and
> know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now.
> http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ
>
>