"Tommi Nieminen" <tommiDOTnieminen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
message news:qyOse.6960$E%6.4250@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Peter T. Daniels kirjoitti:
>
> > David Crystal gives charts of the largest and smallest inventories
in
> > the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language.
>
> Even though Crystal updates the Encyclopedia every now and then, I'd
> suggest Ladefoged and Maddieson's The Sounds of the World's Languages
> (Blackwell, Oxford 1996) for a reference book.
Yes, *highly* recommended, but I doubt if they give phoneme counts for
particular languages, or anything like that. In fact, they seem to
prefer to avoid the concept of phonemes altogether. If you look in the
index, you'll see that the only reference to the word 'phoneme' is on
page 1.
Re: why cant the BBC ... >>> rejects the level and entity of the phoneme entirely (and, IMHO, ... >> it's pretty clear they're not following Halle.... It works in descriptions of languages, it's more compact than any alternative model, so it's what people mostly use. ... It's not necessary to assume more -- no doubt many of the writers of descriptive grammars and typological works have their own ideas about what's going on behind the whole thing, but they don't include it in these books, because there's no point -- the descriptions are intended to be equally useful to readers of all linguistic religions or none. ... (sci.lang)
Re: where do so many tenses come from? ...morphemes, ... language to language (in other languages,... which Antonio replied takes the position of the phoneme into account. ... has nothing to do with semantics.... (sci.lang)
Re: Reference material ...forty years old that I use a lot. ... Other than that the reference book I use most often is called "The Loom ... similarities/differences between four germanic languages and then again ... I own a Strunk and White. ... (rec.arts.sf.composition)
Re: Phonetic Name Generator ... phoneme combinations in several languages....English is very strange because it borrows words ... A first approximation gives one phoneme per letter, ...linguistics books are in boxes right now so I'm not looking it up. ... (rec.games.roguelike.development)
