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Rex May - Baloo wrote: > > I'm beginning to wish the C controversy had never come up. Well, I've > learned a lot from it. I'm just about to revert to the 'C is for Ceqli' > version for the following reasons, exclusive of the problem of what to do > with C itself. > > A great many languages, including Mandarin, English, Hindustani, German, > Russian, Japanese, have /tS/ and /S/ as separate phonemes. None of these > languages have /dZ/ and /Z/ as separate phonemes. Japanese does have /dZ/. It's what you get when either /S/ or /tS/ is voiced. I would guess that the convergence of /Z/ to /dZ/ dates back to Old Japanese, since that's where many fossilized orthographic features go back to. > The only languages I can > dig up that do are Esperanto and (just barely) English. In English, [Z] originally existed as an allophone of /S/, and only became a phoneme /Z/ in its own right as a result of 1066 and all that. (This is so cool! I'm getting to use what I just learned by reading a couple of historical linguistics texts.) > So the symmetry of > tx, x, dj, j is maybe more graphic than real. For one thing, I was > considering the minimal pairs ji and dji, and I didn't want to use them at > all. didn't sound different enough. But tx and x seem just fine. Is it > just me, or is that a language universal, pretty much? /Z/ is certainly uncommon in the limited set of languages that I'm familiar with, but scanning through _The World's Writing Systems_, I see that Tibetan and Manchu seem to have both /Z/ and /dZ/. I didn't spend too much time looking, but those are the only other ones I found. /S/ and /tS/, on the other hand, seem to coexist quite commonly. Many languages have constraints on where certain phonemes can occur. English doesn't permit syllable-initial /N/ or /ts/. Natively, /S/ is not permitted before consonants word-initially, but the influence of Yiddish loans may eventually change this constraint. Japanese doesn't permit /t/ and /d/ before /i/ or /j/, nor /e/ following any affricate, and /ts/ can appear only before /u/. Mandarin doesn't permit /k/, /k'/, and /h/ before /i/ or /y/. But Old Japanese and older forms of Mandarin did permit those sound combinations. As I mentioned before, Arabic has /b/ but not /p/, and /f/ but not /v/. Hokkien is missing /d/ and /z/, and some dialects are missing /dZ/. In Mandarin, only the retroflex fricative /s./ <sh> has a voiced equivalent /z./ <r>. Japanese has /ts/ , but no /dz/. Natural languages aren't all that big on symmetry. -- Mike Wright http://www.CoastalFog.net _______________________________________________________ "When they wired us humans up, they really should have labeled the wires--don't you think?" -- Ed