Re: Phonemes

David Wright Sr. wrote:
>
> António Marques <m.ap@xxxxxxx> wrote in news:42b33b14$0$13518$a729d347
> @news.telepac.pt:
>
> > David Wright Sr. wrote:
> >
> >> The notion of one phoneme per word has very obvious problems
> >
> > Unless every syllable in the language were to be of the form
> > phoneme + neutral vowel (which might also introduce problems with
> > 'vowel' phonemes), there would be some limitations to compounding, no?
> > Of course those people might find xzf edible. Tar does.
>
> Yes, I believe that you are right. If one assumes for the sake of the
> discussion that you could have 800+ phonemes, then at least one of the
> vowel phonemes[1] would have to be a neutral to allow easier pronunciation
> where, otherwise, many combinations would indeed be unpronounceable. Of
> course, this would cut down somewhat on the maximum speed of the language.
>
> [1] You really couldn't call it a 'phoneme' since it would have no
> significance in determining like-not-alike in meaning. Maybe, 'a
> distinctive phonetic marker' using distinctive in the sense that it is
> different from all of the real vowel phonemes. Of course, some languages
> put up with a lot of consonant clusters that seem odd to speakers of other
> languages. I recall how long it took me to properly pronounce the 'fstr'
> sound in the Russian word for 'to meet'.

That was how Aert Kuypers could claim Kabardian had no vowels.

He recanted a few years later.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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