🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan23.083328.46668@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>, miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
|> 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 I recall, another sort of gaffe that Sherzer made was that he lists a
language as having aspirates, ejectives, etc., if his source describes
these as unit phonemes, but not if his source treats them as clusters.
This was true for his Plains section, anyway.

The fundamental problem, though, was that he deduced linguistic areas
from late postcontact culture areas, some of which are less culture 
areas than holding bins, anyway, so the books says virtually nothing of
use about linguistic areas, and certainly nothing of use about culture 
areas.

----
John E. Koontz (koontz@bldr.nist.gov)

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