Monday, March 13, 2006

what's wrong with Haida?

Still going through the loads of late emails, I came across this:

I have computed the Haida Indian texts. I came across a new encounter in my detective story of investigating the occurrence of labial consonants in AmerIndian texts. It has the lowest use of labials - 1.70% only. As I said earlier I expected the labial consonants to have a very small share of the Cocopa speech sound chain since there are only 3 labials in Cocopa [p, w, m]. So, I thought that they would take only 4% or 5% like in Navaho (4.15%) or Iquito (4.83%). To my great surprise the Cocopa labials take 18.69%, i.e. like Odjibwa (17.14%) or Apinaye (17.40%). Therefore, Cocopa has one of the highest concentration of labial consonants in its speech sound chain. However in Haida the same 3 labials give only 1.70% in the Haida speech sound chain. It is the smallest use of labials I found in 168 world languages. I wonder, if it is a typological similarity or it shows some genetical relatedness? I wonder who can tell me why Haida uses so little labials?

Any idea? any one? hellooooo :)

Mai

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