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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Dear Corpora colleagues, the article "Linguistic
and scial typology": the Australian migrations and phoneme inventories" by Peter
Trudgill in "Linguistic Typology" (ed. Frans Plank), Volume 8 - 3, 2004, page
305 - 320, is very interesting. It deals with the size of the phonemic inventory
and the factors which may influence it. Since 1973 when I was a post graduate in
general phonetics and phonology, this is a riddle for me. I remember I was
amazed why some languages have only 3 vowels and about a hundred consonants,
while others have 6 vowels and 12 consonants only? Is it not a riddle? This is
indeed a challenge for linguistic typology, is it not? Peter Trudgill tried to
give his answer, but may be the most interesting were the tests by several other
linguists who supported Trudgill's idea (Keren Rice, p.321 - 342; John Hajek, p.
343 - 350; Barish Kabak, p.351 - 367) and those linguists who opposed Trudgill's
idea with their critiques (Peter Bakker, p. 368 - 375; Vladimir Pericliev, p.
376 - 383). So, the discussion made this issue of Linguistic Typology quite
interesting. I wonder if other linguists would give their opinions on this
problem? I'd urge the editor-in-chief Frans Plank give the opportunity for other
linguists to speak. However, my idea is a little bit different. One should take
into consideration the frequency of occurrence of every phoneme in the speech
chain. It is quite usual that the great inventory uses onle a small part of its
total as the most frequent phonemes. I have studied 157 world languages from
this point of view and came to this conclusion. When the inventory is rather
small then all the phonemes have the great frequency load. May be some other
modern linguists noticed it, I wonder? It is an extremely interesting promlem in
general linguistics and typology. May be some less known languages of Australia
or the Americas have different tendencies? Actually, in the 1960 -1970 when many
languages undergone thorough phonemic counts (among them English, German,
French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Finnish, Hungarian, Mansi, Mari,
Karelian, Estonian, Komi, Nenets, Kazah, Kirgiz, Turkish,
Chookchi, Polish, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Bolgarian, etc. etc) the
languages of Australia or the Americas were never investigated by the methods of
phonostattistics. In fact, the Turkic languages which had many contacts undrwent
the tendency of dropping some complex phonemes. It is quite understandable since
they were nomadic tribes which contacted many other peoples on their way. In my
opinion, these most stable phonemes were the real phonemes of the parent
proto-Turkic, or proto-Slavonic, or wider, proto-Indo-European. One should use
phonostatistics before reconstructing the proto-language. However, now phonemic
counts are not used in the historical reconstructions. Looking forward to
hearing the opinions of those interested to my e-mail address: <A
href="mailto:yutamb@hotmail.com">yutamb@hotmail.com</A> Yours sincerely
Yuri Tambovtsev, Novosibirsk Ped. University, Russia.
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