Inventories
A phoneme inventory lists contrasts supported by the language, not every letter of its alphabet or every allophonic realization. WALS chapter 1 compares the sizes of consonant inventories; chapter 2 compares vowel qualities. Their counting rules differ from simply tallying written symbols. A vowel may differ by length, nasality or tone without adding a new vowel quality under a particular scheme. Before comparing counts, read the scheme’s definition and inspect the underlying description.
An abjad may leave vowels unwritten, and a syllabary may represent consonant clusters only indirectly. Neither gives a direct total of spoken phonemes. Even a spelling with many distinct signs can preserve historical or morphographic distinctions after pronunciation changes. For an ancient language, give a proposed sound system with explicit evidence and uncertainties rather than converting sign counts into phoneme counts.
Tone and intonation
Tone uses pitch to distinguish lexical or grammatical forms; intonation can organize utterances and questions. WALS chapter 13 contrasts these functions and gives modern Yoruba /bí/ “give birth,” /bī/ “ask,” and /bì/ “vomit” as a three-level tone comparison. The spellings are cited teaching data, not a claim about an ancient language. The same chapter explains that sample imbalance affects any raw worldwide proportion of tone languages.
A corpus without tone marks is not evidence that its spoken language lacked tone. Conversely, accent marks added by much later scribes need careful dating. A typological profile should state whether its inventory and prosodic values come from contemporary speakers, historical comparative reconstruction, native description, or editorial convention.
Co-occurrence and explanation
It is tempting to infer that a small consonant inventory requires a large vowel inventory or that tone compensates for lost consonants. A few attractive pairs do not establish a worldwide relation. Define the features, use a diverse sample, test statistical dependence and inspect plausible histories. Contact can spread sounds; inherited sound changes can create similar inventories in related languages. Keep the sound changes of a particular language separate from a cross-language distribution.
Exercise: compare the WALS definitions for consonant and vowel inventory size. Then take an ancient script inventory and list which of its signs may represent sounds, syllables, words or uncertain values. Explain why a sign total cannot be entered as the phoneme count.
Modern-language examples on this page clarify a linguistic pattern. They do not establish unattested sounds or forms for an ancient language. Follow the cited sources below and keep editorial readings separate from the surviving trace.