🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <16B5E12ECF.JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU>, JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU writes:
> In article <Jan.21.22.05.32.1993.1068@pilot.njin.net>
> hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey) writes:
>  
>>
>>
>>Hello again :-)
>>
>>Can anyone direct me to a book which might have vowel systems
>>including dipthongs of all languages (and maybe hopefully of
>>consonants).
>>
>>
>  
> Ian Maddieson at UCLA has done a work, which may not include diphthongs.

This (if I remember correcly) is the final product of the USPID (?)
project, using an unusually large database, and is very good:

	Ian Maddieson
	Patterns of Sounds
	Cambridge University Press, 1984

I don't recall whether it gives phoneme inventories (I think it does),
but it gives interesting generalizations about vowel systems, etc.

The whole enterprise is inherently flawed, though, because very large
surveys have to rely on, and, crucially, interpret, other people's
descriptions.  You're never sure whether you're looking at phones,
phonemes, graphs, half-done analyses, or what. (This doesn't apply to
the Maddieson book, where I think the research was first-hand.) 

For instance if you wanted to include Amerindian vowel systems (the
poster did say "all languages") you might discover Joel Sherzer's _An
Areal-Typological Study of American Indian Languages North of Mexico_
(North-Holland, 1976).  This attempts to give sound inventories of
many languages, but it's rather disastrous.  As an easy example,
Potawatomi has the vowel system

			i		o

				schwa

			e		a

but since Hockett in his IJAL Potawatomi description used "u" for
schwa, Sherzer gives the vowel system as

			i		u

			e		o

				a

For other examples see my review in _Language Sciences_ back around
1977 or so.
 
> Then Hockett's _Manual of Phonology_ has a let of inventories.  However
> these may not be arranged to suit your needs.

Even Hockett made mistakes; his Winnebago phonemes are wrong.  Same
problem: reliance on second-hand data that has to be interpreted.

-Ken
-- 
miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu | Nobody can explain everything to everybody.
opinions are my own      | G. K. Chesterton