Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so

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Zaarin
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Re: Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so

Post by Zaarin »

Frislander wrote:
Zaarin wrote:Some dialects of Haida have /ʔʷ/, which is pretty unusual if I'm not mistaken.
I think I mentioned this before but this is pretty much universal in the Circassian dialect continuum (this is a result of a historical change of uvular ejectives (labialised or not) to glottal stops), I thought it was the only language which had it but thanks for this additional attestation!
As I understand it, in Haida /ʔʷ/ appears in a small number of high-frequency words, but some speakers substitute /ʔ/ instead. Unfortunately, Haida has no known relatives so I don't think the origin of /ʔʷ/ in Haida is known. Masset Haida's epiglottals are pharyngeal in other dialects, though.

EDIT: Okay, I had a slight mixup. Tlingit, not Haida, has /ʔʷ/. And it's the Hydaburg dialect of Haida with epiglottals; Masset Haida has pharyngeals.
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Re: Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so

Post by gestaltist »

I found a useful resource: http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid_info.html

They have only a sample of 450 languages but it's a start. There seems to be way more infrequent phonemes than I'd have thought.

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Re: Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so

Post by Pabappa »

amazing that /t d n s l/ are so rare. There must be a reasn, such as tracking only pure /t/ isntead of /tɣ/~/tʲ/ etc, since for sure there are more languages with coronal elementals than that! e.g. even /s/ shows up at only about 45% .
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Re: Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so

Post by Ser »

SoapBubbles wrote:amazing that /t d n s l/ are so rare. There must be a reasn, such as tracking only pure /t/ isntead of /tɣ/~/tʲ/ etc, since for sure there are more languages with coronal elementals than that! e.g. even /s/ shows up at only about 45% .
Dental and alveolar consonants are separated. For example, Nenets has no /t tʲ n nʲ s l/ in UPSID because it's got /t̪ t̪ʲ n̪ n̪ʲ s̪ l̪/.

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Pole, the
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Re: Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so

Post by Pole, the »

SoapBubbles wrote:amazing that /t d n s l/ are so rare. There must be a reasn, such as tracking only pure /t/ isntead of /tɣ/~/tʲ/ etc, since for sure there are more languages with coronal elementals than that! e.g. even /s/ shows up at only about 45% .
Yes, also languages where the default pronunciation is dental and not alveolar, e.g. Bulgarian or Russian. Also also, UPSID has at least three different designations for coronal stops: «t d» (“alveolar”), «tD dD» (“dental”) and «"t "d» (“dental/alveolar”), each of which is counted separately. (Granted, there are some languages where the alveolar and dental variants contrast, but they are a small fraction.) If we counted dental and alveolar variants together, both [n] and [t] would have a count above 400, making it to the top three, and [s] would be well above 300 as the most common fricative.

The biggest problem, I guess, is that these databases think of language phonologies as of sets of individual indivisible phones, instead of ways the articulation space can be divided that need different degrees of granularity.

(Also see this string of posts from two years before now.)
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