Re: If you were to design a language, how many vowels and consonants would you use?

In article
<4a92dd81-0b76-42e9-8c88-f4887c3671cf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Jens S. Larsen" <jens_s_larsen@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nathan Sanders:

rather than (fruitlessly) try to impose your own
idiosyncratic jargon on the field.

Is it only my jargon that's idiosyncratic? I hoped my ideas would be
so too.

I'm not sure what's so idiosyncratic about thinking that all human
languages have commonalities.

What *is* idiosyncratic is claiming that since some commonalities
exist, there therefore aren't any differences.

I have a lot in common with a gorilla (quite possibly moreso than
English has in common with Mandarin, but I'm not about to define a
metric for computing the comparison), but that doesn't mean I *am* a
gorilla.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.