query: alveolar/dental asymmetries in phoneme inventories

[David Gil]

Dear all,

In Malay and Indonesian, the apical stops exhibit a curious 
place-of-articulation asymmetry: whereas [d] is alveolar, [t] is dental 
or (for some speakers, typically women) interdental.  In recent 
field-work, I seem to have encountered a similar asymmetry in two other 
quite distant Austronesian languages, Mentawai and Roon (though I'm not 
yet entirely sure of the facts here.)

My two questions:

(a) how common is this asymmetry (or for that matter the mirror-image 
one) in the languages of the world?

(b) specifically for Austronesian languages, I would also appreciate 
authorative reports of languages that do *not* exhibit this asymmetry 
(ie. languages where both [d] and [t] are alveolar, or both [d] and [t] 
are dental, or both [d] and [t] can be either alveolar or dental, or 
there is no contrast between [d] or [t], or whatever.  My interest in 
this latter question is that I would like to try and map the 
geographical distribution of this asymmetry in the insular Southeast 
Asian region.

Thanks,

David

-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

Telephone: 49-341-3550321 Fax: 49-341-3550119
Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
Webpage:  http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/