Re: Phonemes

John Atkinson wrote:
>
> "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.

Ditto _both_ recent phonology books in the Cambridge Red series.

I can't help wondering where the post-McCarthy phonologists think the
data they manipulate come from, since they have no interest in either
phonological systems or what we called "discovery procedures" -- the art
of determining a language's inventory of phonemes.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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