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> there are languages with a relatively small number of distinct syllables, like Japanese

Japanese has around 50 syllabic symbols, depending on how you count - include both sets of kana? include more archaic kana? etc

What would be a more typical number of syllabic symbols? I tried googling it to get an idea, but couldn't find much useful information. I guess Arabic has 28?

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I think they meant syllables specifically, not syllabic symbols. Meanings syllabic symbols might get confused for an alphabet if the language has a sufficiently small set of syllables. See https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/36909

Yeah, was aware of that possibility; I guess I should have made a point about the disctinction between symbols vs "possible sound combinations" (my words). And even "possible sound combinations" can be further limited to "actually used sound combinations" as mentioned in the answer on that SO link.

So, in terms of "possible sound combinations" I think Japanese would likely be on the lower side given that the number of sounds are also pretty low. Alright, thank you for that reply; the point in the original post I replied to makes more sense to me now.

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