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John Cowan cowan@hidden.email [engelang], On 16/12/2014 04:39:
pkroser57@hidden.email [engelang] scripsit:My best guess is that an optimal vowel system would be between 5 and 8 vowels, with 5 = {i, e, a, o, u} and 8 = {i, y, e, ø, ɯ, u, a, o}, while the optimal phoneme inventory will probably be between 25 and 50 consonants.Front rounded vowels are rare in the world's languages. See <http://wals.info/chapter/11>. Back unrounded vowels are even rarer. Check out other stuff at WALS.
I think not much weight can be placed on WALS for these purposes, for at least the following reasons: (a) phonemic analysis is not straightforward, so there is a good chance analyses are wrong; (b) phonemic contrasts can be a long way from surface phonetic contrasts, which is what we're enquiring into; (c) WALS (iirc) doesn't present the allophonic range of phonemes, so you can tell what contrasts phonetically with what, in any given language. At least for judging auditory discriminability, I would recommend using a combination of (i) one's own judgement, (ii) auditory phonetic first principles, (iii) discrimination experiments with subjects with many different L1s. (iii) is too much faff for us to do here, and we here probably don't have the knowledge to do (ii); maybe (ii) and (iii) are reported in the phonetic literature. But for present purposes I'm interested in (i). I think Paul/Bfowol/Pfal is right to formulate the question not as "What's the max number of robustly contrasing consonants" but rather "What's the max number of robustly contrasting clusters of one or more consonants", tho the latter number must be so large as for it to be quite onerous to work out what it is. --And.