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Ask-A-Linguist - Message details
Subject: Limit of tones, cases, gender, plural
Question:
I have been told that Cantonese has 6 (or 9) tones, Finnish has 16 cases, Swahili has 8 genders, and Russian has singular, plural and REALLY plural. Those are very surprising (to me, at least), but I'm sure that there's more. What's the limit of these sorts of differences in language expression and what are some other examples? Thank you for your time and consideration.

Reply:
My comment is that not all the items you mention are equivalent. Tones refer to
phonemic (sound) inventories while number/gender/case are inflectional features.

It's important to distinguish what type of item your discussing because some items,
such as numbers of nouns (probably in the tens of thousands) have larger limits
than others.

I suspect there are limits for the sound system and inflectional morphology in terms
of magnitude, but it may be hard to set an absolute limit. For instance we know
languages can have between 3-14 vowels (or more), but not 100's of vowels.
However, if I set an absolute max (e.g. 20 vowels max), I bet 1) there would be a
counterexample and 2) there would be arguments about what counts as a vowel.

Reply From: Elizabeth J Pyatt    click here to access email
Date: Sep-10-2009
Other Replies:
  1. Re: Limit of tones, cases, gender, plural Madalena Cruz-Ferreira    (Sep-10-2009)
  2. Re: Limit of tones, cases, gender, plural Herbert Frederic Stahlke    (Sep-10-2009)
  3. Re: Limit of tones, cases, gender, plural Joseph F Foster    (Sep-10-2009)
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