Re: Phonemes

"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in news:42B319AF.7AB2
@worldnet.att.net:

(snip)

> David Crystal gives charts of the largest and smallest inventories in
> the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Largest is a Khoisan language
> with four or five articulations for each of the clicks, totaling
> 80-something IIRC; smallest is Rotokas, with 11.
>
> Why would there be a theoretical maximum?
>

Thanks for the leads.

I would suspect that there would some upper limit, (not necessarily absolute,
but variable within some limits), to the number of phonetic variations that
could be used without running into serious confusion between them.

My original basis for asking this was due to a story by my favorite author[1]
written in 1948 called 'Gulf'. In it, the author using the work of Ogden and
Richards in Basic English, and Alfred Korzybski in General Semantics, and
implicitly, some linguist[2], postulated a language called 'speedtalk'. In
simple terms, speedtalk was based on the notion of one phoneme per word for
the roughly 800 words of a language similar, but not strictly based on Basic
Language. In concept, the structure of the language was more along the lines
of LogLan.

The notion of one phoneme per word has very obvious problems, not alone
considering what I suspect would be caused by running into a much reduced
upper limit, but also having serious problems with a lack of redundancy. IOW,
I simply don't believe that it would possibly work. Of course, he did
postulating that the speakers of this language were 'homo novis', the
beginning of a new sub-species of man whose 'superman ability' was the
ability to 'think better'. see:
http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2005/05/gulf_by_robert_.html
for a critical review on the story.

Anyway, as much as I respect this author and like his works, I think that he
was trying to either overlook limitations of real linguistics, or that he
simply had an incomplete understanding of linguistics, to make a plot point.

I was just curious as to what people might think on the notion of a practical
upper limit.

[1] Who? - you ask. Just check many of my sig-files.

[2] Probably Bloomfield.

David Wright

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Relevant Pages

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