LINGUIST List 13.63

Fri Jan 11 2002

Qs: Sound Patterns in Langs, Gen'l Phonetics: z>h

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>



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  • Yuri Tambovtsev, Sound patterns in languages of different morphological structures
  • Remy Viredaz, General phonetics : z > h ?

    Message 1: Sound patterns in languages of different morphological structures

     Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 00:07:47 +0600
    From: Yuri Tambovtsev <yutambhotmail.com>
    Subject: Sound patterns in languages of different morphological structures


    Dear colleagues, I wonder if you know how to get texts of North American Indian languages of incorporating morphological type in the electronic form? Or aboriginal Australian languages? I'm feeding in my computer somestories of the Sweet Grass Cree collected by L. Bloomfield. I was surprised how similar it sounds to Mansi (Vogul) of Siberia. I wonder if anybody could tell me if the Sweet Grass Cree language is agglutinative or incorporating? My aim is to detect the similarity of sound distribution in the languages of different morphological word structure. I failed to find the data on the phonemic occurrence of North American Indian languages. I wonder if there were any publications on those? Actually, I'm Looking forward to hearing from you about any incorporating language in the elecronic form.

    The other subject that I'd like to discuss is the sound pictures of world languages. Why it is important to compute the phonemic frequencies of occurrence in a language. Every language has this or that unigue sound picture. One can intuitively feel that language "A" is different from language "B" hearing the sound picture of a language. The phonemic frequencies of occurrence create this or that sound mosaic of a language. We can compare world languages with each other after we obtain the sound picture of every world language. Now linguists believe that there are about 4000 or 5000 languages in the world. However, unfortunately, there are only 120 data on phonemeic frequency of occurrence I that I could collect for world languages. Many of them we computed in Novosibirsk (Russia). This is why, I urge world linguists to join our group of phoneticians who investigate the sound picture of world languages. The data on frequency of occurrence of phonemes and phonemic groups have been published in my 3 books in Russian. One can find the references in the third book: Nekotorye teoreticheskie polozhenija tipologii upor'adochennosti fonem v zvukovoj tsepochke jazyka i kompendium statisticheskih harakteristik osnovnyh grupp soglasnyh fonem. - Novosibirsk: Novosibirsk klassicheskij institut, 2001. - 130 pages. I'd like to go on studying the frequencies of phonemic occurrences of less known world languages.

    This time I took up the Ngaanyatjarra language which is an aboriginal language of Australia. Could anyone send me the phonemic system of Ngaanyatjarra? I need especially the system of Ngaanyatjarra consonants. In the Linguistlist I read a lot of interesting discissions on different matters but never on phonostatistics. I wonder how one can foresee the labial consonants being distributed in different world languages. One should bear in mind that languages are different in all aspect. I wonder if labial distribution is the same, no matter how different languages may be. This is why I took the Aboriginal Australian language of Nunggubuyu and Hanga of Ghana and compared them to Japanese and 120 other world languages. The results are rather unexpected, at least for me. I wonder where I could publish them in English?

    Those linguists who are interested or could help may write me to my email address yutambhotmail.com

    Looking forward to joint efforts.

    Wishing you a Happy 2002 year, Yuri Tambovtsev Novosibirsk Ped.University

    Message 2: General phonetics : z > h ?

     Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2002 20:38:02 +0100
    From: Remy Viredaz <remy.viredazbluewin.ch>
    Subject: General phonetics : z > h ?


    Various languages in different parts of the world have undergone a conditioned change s > h. But :

    (a) are there languages where there has been a general, unconditioned change s > h ?

    (b) are there languages where z (as voiced counterpart of s) has changed to voiced h or any similar sound, and under what conditions ?

    (c) among the languages in (b), is voiceless s maintained or is it changed to h ?

    Thank you all for any help.

    - R�my Viredaz 1, rue Chandieu CH - 1202 Gen�ve Suisse