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Languages with most / fewest phonemes | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Mikael84 Bilingual Pentaglot Groupie Peru Joined 5301 days ago 76 posts - 116 votes  Speaks: French*, Finnish*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Arabic (classical), German, Russian | Message 1 of 11 11 October 2010 at 11:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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Does anyone have info on this? I have long been curious about what the minimum number of phonemes is for a language to function. It would also be fun to know what languages have the most phonemes.
My impression, based on the languages that I know of, is that Russian has a lot of different sounds whereas Chinese has relatively few. Another interesting and related subtopic is not quantity but variety of phonemes. For example, Arabic has a bunch of very similar sounds - consonants and their emphatic counterparts. I guess they would all count as different phonemes but they are extremely similar to one another. Has anyone ever studied this matter more comprehensively? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6950 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 2 of 11 12 October 2010 at 2:31am | IP Logged | ||
By 'Chinese' you mean Mandarin, right? I'm not sure where you got the impression that it has few phonemes. From Wikipedia:
Hawaiian, on the other hand, has 13 phonemes: 8 consonants and 5 vowels. If you count the long vowels as separate phonemes, the total number increases to 18. The constructed language Toki Pona apparently only has 9 consonants and 5 vowels. I'm not sure whether this 'counts' for you, but it is relevant to your questions about the minimum number required to function, since it is a functioning language. Edited by Lucky Charms on 12 October 2010 at 2:34am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Mikael84 Bilingual Pentaglot Groupie Peru Joined 5301 days ago 76 posts - 116 votes Speaks: French*, Finnish*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Arabic (classical), German, Russian | Message 3 of 11 12 October 2010 at 5:50am | IP Logged | ||
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Interesting. I had the impression Mandarin had a lot of homonyms, I guess not then. Hawaiian must have a lot of them!
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| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6787 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 4 of 11 12 October 2010 at 6:50am | IP Logged | ||
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Rotokas is known for its small inventory of phonemes. It has six consonants and either five or 10 vowels (depending on whether vowel length is viewed as phonemic).
!Xu (there may be a tilde on the 'u') contrastly is know for its extensive inventory, having somewhere in the neighborhood of 84 consonants and 30 or so vowels if memory serves (feel free to correct if it doesn't). There are languages with as few as two vowels, and I don't think any has fewer than three consonants (I suspect the minimum is actually higher for this). Although of course there could be languages unstudied which best any of these numbers. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 5 of 11 12 October 2010 at 8:47am | IP Logged | ||
Mandarin does have lots of homonyms, by some definitions of homonyms. That is, lots of characters are homonyms, and every character has a meaning. But in spoken Mandarin relatively few characters are used on their own. They're usually combined into two-character compound words and this drastically reduces the number of homonyms. Formal and archaic written language often uses characters on their own, and can be so full of homonyms that they're incomprehensible when read aloud. A lot of Tang dynasty poetry is like this. Whereas I'd call this Chinese, however, I couldn't call it Modern Standard Mandarin. Whether it's a kind of Mandarin or not (Mandarin is, strictly speaking, a group of Chinese dialects/languages) is debatable. At any rate, when these poems were written, the pronunciation was pretty different from how it is now. The amount of character homonyms are large, not because of a scarcity of phonemes, but because they are so unevenly used. Some combinations, like "gei" and "shei" are only used by a single character, whereas others, such as "xi" are used by hundreds. Many are simply not used at all. A sound like "xui" is a straightforward combination of a common Mandarin initial and a final, but it's not used at all in Mandarin. Edited by Ari on 12 October 2010 at 8:49am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| DaisyMaisy Senior Member United States Joined 5381 days ago 115 posts - 178 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish Studies: Swedish, Finnish | Message 6 of 11 17 October 2010 at 4:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Ari, do you think the homonymns in Mandarin have contributed to it being a tonal language? It seems like "ma" can be differentiated at least four ways based on tone.
I know next to nothing about Mandarin, but interesting thread! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MäcØSŸ Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5810 days ago 259 posts - 392 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2 Studies: German | Message 7 of 11 17 October 2010 at 10:24am | IP Logged | ||
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Mandarin homonyms depend on its strict phonotactics. Mandarin syllables consist of an initial consonant, a glide, a
vowel and a final (which can only be u i, n, ng). This is the result of the evolution of the language, other Chinese languages like Min Nan have 9 finals (u, i, n, ng, m, p, t, k, ʔ). Apparently the loss of final consonants in Mandarin resulted in the creation of tones replacing them (people will tend to say “bam” with a lower tone than “bak”, so the first may turn into “bá” and the latter into “bā”). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 8 of 11 17 October 2010 at 10:55am | IP Logged | ||
Then where do the tones in the other Chinese languages come from? Cantonese has both many more finals than Mandarin and more tones (6 to 10, depending on how you count). Mandarin has lost tones over time, rather than gained them. Here's how I understand it: The older Chinese languages were largely monosyllabic (that is, one word one syllable). Tones and a large variety of phonemes was how this was accomplished. Classical Chinese writing is pretty much monosyllabic. The historical development in most of the descendants has been to reduce the number of tones and phonemes, resulting in the need to create more polysyllabic words to deal with the many homonyms. In Mandarin this development has gone relatively far, which means it has few tones left and a mostly bisyllabic vocabulary. Cantonese has preserved more tones and more phonemes, which is why many words that are bisyllabic in Mandarin are still monosyllabic in Cantonese. I'm guessing the other Chinese languages all fall on different places on this scale. I've heard (though don't hold me to it) that Shanghainese only rarely uses tones to distinguish between words anymore, and even their word for "I" is bisyllabic. EDIT: Cantonese has 19 initials and 53 finals, compared to Mandarin's 23 initials and 36 finals. Edited by Ari on 17 October 2010 at 10:59am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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