Question

The Norwegian language has up to 42 phonemes. English has around 36. Some Brazilian rainforest languages have as few as 10, and isolated African languages have up to 140. Briefly explain why these differences are possible.

Answer 1

Different languages ​​have different numbers of phonemes and these languages ​​differ because of the number of phonemes these languages ​​have in their language systems.

Languages ​​use only a small subset possible sounds that human speech organs can produce. Then we have Allophony, which is a predictable phonetic variation of a phoneme that will generally make the number of distinct phonemes less than the number of identifiably distinct sounds. Both the Norwegian language, which has up to 42 phonemes, and English, which has about 36, must have more sounds, while some Brazilian rainforest languages, which only have 10 phonemes, must have more distinct sounds, but no more than English or any African language.

Learn more about The Norwegian language on brainly.com/question/8625282

#SPJ4