Darren's Mitsiefa Thread

[bradrn]

While it's a bizarre analysis, it's the biggest discrepancy between consonant phones and phonemes I've ever seen – on average more than 6 distinct realisations of each phoneme. And yes, obviously it's complete bunk.

Moloko (Chadic) has a single vowel phoneme with 5 realisations, plus another 5 realisations of an epenthetic vowel, thanks to word-level ‘prosodic’ features. Quite a lot of the Chadic languages are similar. So I wouldn’t be so confident as to call this one ‘obviously complete bunk’.

(That being said, the details of this analysis do look a great deal more strained than the Chadic ones. I don’t see the point of positing prosodies if they only ever apply to one CV syllable at a time!)

[Darren]

While it's a bizarre analysis, it's the biggest discrepancy between consonant phones and phonemes I've ever seen – on average more than 6 distinct realisations of each phoneme. And yes, obviously it's complete bunk.

Moloko (Chadic) has a single vowel phoneme with 5 realisations, plus another 5 realisations of an epenthetic vowel, thanks to word-level ‘prosodic’ features. Quite a lot of the Chadic languages are similar. So I wouldn’t be so confident as to call this one ‘obviously complete bunk’.

(That being said, the details of this analysis do look a great deal more strained than the Chadic ones. I don’t see the point of positing prosodies if they only ever apply to one CV syllable at a time!)

Yeah I draw the line at having not one but three different syllable-level nasalisations. His argument mostly rests on the fact that /e ɛ/ and /o ɔ/ are non-contrastive before prenasalised stops and after nasals, which apparently is a much bigger problem than the fact that half of his "prosodies" only occur with two (2) consonant onsets.

[Darren]

How's this for obscure? A five-consonant inventory used in a (partly incorrect) transliteration of Persepolitan late Elamite texts by Edward Hincks in 1846:

Code: Select all

 p   t   k
     s
     n

Modern analysis suggests more like eleven consonants – still fairly small. I like Hincks's thinking though (he added the vowels /i u ə˞ a/ which is delicious).