On 6 Mar 2008 at 13:44, James K. Denson wrote: > TIPS language experts, > > These questions were asked today in class and I am clueless as to the > answers.
> What language has the least phonemes? No language expert but a dab hand (ahem!) at Google turns up this apparently authoritative website: http://www.vistawide.com/languages/language_statistics.htm (world language statistics and facts) with an answer to that one and to others your class didn't think of but probably want to know anyway. For least phonemes, the website nominates Rotokas with 11 phonemes. spoken by 4300 people in East Papua. (they provide a short bibliography of their sources at the bottom of the page) For the category of greatest number of phonemes, Don Allen suggested !Kung. The website instead gives another click language, called !Xóõ with 112 phonemes, spoken by approximately 4200 speakers in Botswana, Phonemes are not all that easy to count, so it's not surprising that the record-holder could be in dispute. It occurred to me that !Kung and !Xóõ could be the same language but they turn out to be different, although both are classified as Khoisan languages (and both are spoken in Namibia). Wikipedia in fact admonishes: "!Kung - A Khoisan language also known as !X? (but not to be confused with !Xóõ)". You can hear the click phonemes characteristic of these languages in some of the songs of the great African singer, Miriam Makeba. in particular the aptly-named "The Click Song". Remarkable! (and crank that volume up!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHxkiXALQjU Stephen ----------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Subscribe to discussion list (TIPS) for the teaching of psychology at http://flightline.highline.edu/sfrantz/tips/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
