Introduction

Stops occur in the inventories of all known languages and have appropriately been regarded as the optimal consonants (e.g. by Jakobson and Halle 1956: 42). The most frequently found types of stops are plosives, that is, stops made with an egressive pulmonic airstream. Apart from differences in place of articulation, these may vary in a number of ways through variations in laryngeal settings and in the relative timing of voice onset and offset and of velic closure or opening. In addition there are stops made with glottalic and velaric airstreams, i.e. ejective stops, implosives and clicks. The principal architecture of stop systems is conveniently discussed in terms of two dimensions representing the manner series and the places of articulation that occur. In this chapter, we will therefore analyze the structure of stop systems in the languages in the UPSID database in terms of the number of series and the number of places used. We will also examine in more detail some questions concerning the frequency of stops, particularly plosives, at different places of articulation. Glottalic and laryngealized stops are discussed in more detail in a separate chapter on glottalic consonants (Chapter 7). Clicks are not the subject of any special analysis, mainly because so few of the UPSID languages contain any, and they are not included in the totals in this chapter. However, nonlateral affricates (except affricated clicks) are included in some of the analyses because of the close relationship of affricates to stops.