On 27 Jul 2010, at 14:52, Jane McGary wrote: > Many languages have far more than 35 phonemes, or meaningful sounds, and a > few have fewer than that. I've worked with more than one language of which > we said, ruefully, that it has more phonemes than speakers. The classical example of such a language is Ubykh, which has about 82 consonants (depending on who's counting), 3 vowels, and no speakers at all, for an infinite ratio of phonemes to speakers. Linguistic studies of Ubykh when it was still a living language included x- raying speakers in order to determine just how they articulated those many consonants. It is (recte, was) a Northwestern Caucasian language related to Abkhaz and Adyghe, more distantly to Chechen and a number of others. The last fluent native speaker died in 1992. You can read all about it here: http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/tevfik.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubykh_language/ The history of the Ubykhs is a mournful story of the deliberate crushing of a small ethnic group by overt imperialists. Regrettably, I can't think of any notable geophytes native to the area formerly inhabited by the Ubykhs, west of the western end of the Caucasus, but what do I know? -- Rodger Whitlock Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Maritime Zone 8, a cool Mediterranean climate on beautiful Vancouver Island http://maps.google.ca/maps/…