Ecological influences on phoneme inventories?

[Pabappa]

and perhaps the bidental percussive.

Im in the middle on this issue really ... in fact Im a bit disappointed nobody here remembered me posting the Everett article a few years ago .... though to be fair i wasnt the one who brought it up even then and I dont remember who did, so ... at least its not just me.

One thing you all havent brought up yet that's in the Everett article is that voiced stops are more common in tropical climates. Again we can argue over cause and effect, but the pattern is clear at least so long as we are willing to count e.g. Bantu as a whole bunch of languages instead of just one, and likewise for all the Australian languages, .... just those two together is enough to tip the scales, because almost all languages in both of those groups have an abundance of voiced stops. Against that, I can only think of some IE languages like Gaelic and Welsh where voiced stops are more common, and even there there are dialects which have devoiced them all.

[Kuchigakatai]

I’ve never heard of this before; do you have any more info? I’m surprised to hear that voiceless resonants were once common in the area.

Voice doesn't have anything to do with it - that's fortis as in long

I imagine you're talking about Latin's geminate m n l r, and Proto-Germanic + early medieval Germanic geminate m n l (and r?)?

[Nortaneous]

I imagine you're talking about Latin's geminate m n l r, and Proto-Germanic + early medieval Germanic geminate m n l (and r?)?

Not exactly - Latin had a pervasive gemination contrast and geminates couldn't appear word-finally. I'm talking about the Gaelic fortis resonants (preserved in some Irish dialects) and the Proto-Basque contrast between *n *l *r and *N *L *R (there was no bilabial nasal). If the orthographic word-final geminate resonants in Old English were real those might fit in somewhere as well, as might the sound changes affecting geminate resonants in parts of Western Romance, maybe

[Vijay]

I just noticed this thread tbh. Isn't this basically just a variation of Whorf-Sapir? "People's languages are different because of their non-linguistic cultural practices, where they live, etc."

[Talskubilos]

I imagine you're talking about Latin's geminate m n l r, and Proto-Germanic + early medieval Germanic geminate m n l (and r?)?

Not exactly - Latin had a pervasive gemination contrast and geminates couldn't appear word-finally. I'm talking about the Gaelic fortis resonants (preserved in some Irish dialects) and the Proto-Basque contrast between *n *l *r and *N *L *R (there was no bilabial nasal).

As a matter of fact, Mitxelena's (later quoted by Trask) PB reconstruction is based on Latin-Romance loanwords, so it would actually reflect some kind of Vasco-Romance language rather than Proto-Basque itself. For example, in intervocalic position PB *l and *r merged into Basque [ɾ] (tap rhotic), while PB *L > Basque [l], so the actual contrast is /l ~ ɾ/. On the other hand, the tap rhotic is forbidden at word-initial but it can be found in a few cases at word-final.

[bradrn]

I just noticed this thread tbh. Isn't this basically just a variation of Whorf-Sapir? "People's languages are different because of their non-linguistic cultural practices, where they live, etc."

Certainly not. Whorf–Sapir is the postulate that the language one speaks determines the way one thinks — i.e. the converse of your claim. This thread covers the postulate that location determines phonology, which is quite different.