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And Rosta scripsit:
> If there is such a bias, it must be universal, but I don't know if there
> is. I suspect it's universal, that the i/y contrast is greater than u/M,
> but I can't cite formant values or a phonetics textbook to support that.
WALS <http://wals.info> is the first port of call for questions like this.
In Chapter 11 on front rounded vowels, Ian Maddieson writes:
The lip position of vowels is generally correlated with the
height and backness of the vowel, as discussed in Chapter
2. Normally vowels which are back and not low are pronounced
with the lips in a rounded position (e.g. [o] and [u]). Front and
central vowels and back low vowels are normally pronounced with
the lips unrounded (e.g. [i], [e], [a]). Lip rounding involves
drawing the corners of the lips together and protruding the lips
forward from their normal rest position. The ability to make
these gestures with the lips is greatest when the vowel is high;
as the jaw is opened further to make progressively lower vowels,
the amount of adjustment of the lips that is possible becomes
more limited, since the lips are being stretched vertically. This
mechanical constraint may account for the fact that low vowels
are normally unrounded, whether front or back. As for non-low
vowels, the association of lip rounding with back vowels has to
do with reinforcing the low-pitched acoustic overtones that are
characteristic of back vowels. Rounding and protruding the lips
lowers the frequencies of the acoustic resonances of the vocal
tract to add to the lowering effect produced by the action of
backing the body of the tongue. A rounded back vowel is therefore
more clearly distinct from other vowels than an unrounded one
(see Stevens 1972).
Although the occurrence of lip rounding with back non-low
vowels is the normal pattern, front vowels with lip rounding and
back non-low vowels without lip rounding do both occur in the
inventories of vowels of a minority of languages. This chapter
will focus on the occurrence of one class of these less usual
vowels, the front rounded vowels. In the sample of languages
surveyed for this chapter, there are only 37 languages (about
6.6%) in which one or more such vowels are recognized as part
of the vowel inventory as defined in Chapter 2.
There is no chapter on back unrounded vowels at all, probably because of
their rarity. Chapter 2 is about vowels distinguished by quality alone
(that is, distinctions of quantity and nasalization are discarded).
It shows that 2-4 vowel qualities dominate in America and Australia,
and 7-14 vowel qualities (typically with vowel harmony restrictions) are
found mostly in the equatorial belt, with 5-6 vowel qualities dominating
in the rest of the world, exceptions being mostly accounted for (as in
the Germanic and Romance languages) by situations in which old quantity
distinctions have become quality distinctions.
So I would be chary of going past 6 vowel qualities including the
epenthetic (buffer) vowel.
--
John Cowan <cowan@hidden.email> http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
It's like if you meet an really old, really rich guy covered in liver
spots and breathing with an oxygen tank, and you say, "I want to be
rich, too, so I'm going to start walking with a cane and I'm going to
act crotchety and I'm going to get liver disease. --Wil Shipley