ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 20: Sindhi Sindhi is the language of the Sindhi people of P
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 20: Sindhi Sindhi is the language of the Sindhi people of Pakistan and India. It is an Indo-Aryan language, the branch of Indo-European family that includes Hindi and Persian. Sindhi, like many languages of the Indian subcontinent, has a particularly large inventory of consonants; 46 by some counts (compare to English’s 24). This is largely due to the pattern of distribution. Here is an example of what I mean by this: of you take the English class of consonants known as “stops” they are distributed across four places of articulation, i.e. Places in the mouth where sound is produced: with the lips (bilabial) as in “p”, with the tongue against the top of your gums (alveolar) as in “t”, with the tongue against the hard palate as in “ch”, and with the tongue against the soft palate (velar) as in “k”. Within each place of articulation is an additional pattern, a contrasting voiced and voiceless pair (voicing refers to the vibrating of your vocal chords). So in addition to the examples I just gave (all voiceless) we also get “b”, “d”, “j”, and “g”. Sindhi takes this a bit further. First of all it has a 5-way place distribution, adding retroflex (underside of the tongue against the roof of the mouth) to the mix. Then, in addition to having a two way voicing distinction it also has a two way aspiration system (aspirated consonants are said with an extra puff of air at the onset). So for just bilabial stops Sindhi has “p” (voiceless, unaspirated), “b” (voiced, unaspirated), “ph” (voiceless, aspirated", and “bh” (voiced aspirated)! -- source link