User talk:Rua/Archives/2015/September

Northern Sami <lj>

I'm not going to push the point, but if your source for ⟨lj⟩ being one phoneme is the paper of Bals, Odden, and Rice, what they have to say about it is that "the palatal lateral [ʎ,ʎʎ] is probably phonetically distinct from the sequence [lj]" — that is, never mind phonemics, the data is scant enough that they're not fully confident the difference exists at all! Those authors also studiously avoid using phoneme slashes // in the inventory section.

Anyway, statements about phonetics are intrinsically less POV than statements about phonemes, in that assigning phones to phonemes requires analysis and there are often multiple possible analyses. I was only trying to be cautious. 4pq1injbok (talk) 16:08, 13 September 2015 (UTC)