A Typological Analysis of Implication among the Vowel Systems

In the history of the phonological typology in the twentieth century, various attempts have been made for the class of vowels: triangular and qaudrangular shape classification in Trubetzkoy (1939), peripheral and interior vowel dichotomy in Crothers (1978), to name only a few. These are, however, the investigation within one subcategory of the vowel phonemes, mainly basic vowels. This paper is a typological consideration of vowel systems across the boundaries of the subcategories of basic, long, and nasals and the class of glides, focusing on the implicational inclinations beyond them. The most important finding in the following sections is that there are some essential difference between long and nasal systems. That is to say, long vowels are mere prolongation of their short/basic counterparts in general, while nasal systems are entirely different from one language to another with regard to number and arrangement of the phonemes; the latter are NOT mere nasalization of their oral counterparts. This is due to the articulatory conditioning in nasalization. Another aspect is that the basic vowels are not always unmarked in terms of number of phonemes. In some languages such as Urdu and Panjabi,though absolute minority among the languages in the world, the number of long vowels are greater than that of the short counterpart. Still in such languages, however, the basic vowels are indispensable