Phonemic palatalized vs. "other" consonant systems

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m fascinated by the split in consonants that so far I only know of in Russian and in the Insular Celtic languages (principally Irish/Irish Gaelic).

For those who don’t know, in these language, many of the consonants come in pairs. In Irish, for example, each plosive comes in two flavors–velarized (or derived from a velarized form) and palatalized (or derived from a palatalized form).

In Irish language instruction, these are called the “broad” and “slender” forms of the consonant.

pˠ/pʲ, t̪ˠ/tʲ, k/c, bˠ/bʲ, d̪ˠ/dʲ, ɡ/ɟ, fˠ/fʲ, sˠ/ʃ, x/ç, w/vʲ, ɣ/j, mˠ/mʲ, n̪ˠ/n, ɾˠ/ɾʲ, l̪ˠ/lʲ
Similarly in Russian, many of the consonants come in pairs, non-palatalized and palatalized (“hard” and “soft”).

m/mʲ, n/nʲ, b/bʲ, d/dʲ, ɡ/ɡʲ, p/pʲ, t/t, k/kʲ, t͡s/t͡sʲ, f/fʲ, s/sʲ, ʂ/ɕː, x/xʲ, v/vʲ, z/zʲ, ʐ/ʑː, ɫ/lʲ, r/rʲ

For those of us non-native to these languages, these differences can be difficult to perceive, not to mention pronounce ourselves. But these differences are phonemic, so mispronouncing a consonant can change the meaning of a word.

I’m curious about this phenomenon. Is it as rare as it seems to me? I can’t think of many languages with this phonemic distinction.

And both Russian and Irish are Indo-European languages, but from different branches–Slavic and Celtic. Were there any other now-extinct IE languages that had this phonemic feature? How did these languages end up with them? Did they develop completely independently? Were they influenced by some other language? Are there non-IE languages with such a feature?

I’m interested in these kinds of phonemic features, because I speak Bengali, which has three prominent features that are very difficult for most native English speakers to grasp–gemination (“doubled” consonants), aspiration (“breathy” consonants), and the dental-retroflex split that affects the T, D (and possibly N and R) consonants.

Anyone have information about or interest in these issues?

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I have much interest but little information about such things. I’ll note that gemination does occur in English and is actually phonemic in some cases – a classic minimal pair is night rain vs. night train. Consonants occur in aspirated and unaspirated forms in English but the difference is not phonemic, like the P in pot vs. spot.

Regarding dental/retroflex: Klingon has a dental T but no retroflex version, and it has a retroflex D but no dental version. I believe Okrand put this feature in the language deliberately because such an “unbalanced” phonology doesn’t occur in human languages.

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[Moderating]

Moving from CS to IMHO.

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In Semitic languages, the contrasting series of consonants are conceived to be pharyngeal vs. non-pharyngeal. In many Caucasian and American Indian languages, the opposition is between glottalized and non-glottalized. Some of them, like Ubykh, include contrasts of glottalized, labialized, palatalized (and maybe a pharyngeal or two).

That’s without even starting on the click languages…

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In English, Bengali, and other Indo-European languages we distinguish voiced series of consonants from unvoiced. Chinese, for example, doesn’t use that distinction, but instead combines series of aspirated vs. unaspirated contrasts with series of dental, palatal, and retroflex consonants. Apart from Chinese, only Polish comes to mind as having the three-way palatal vs. retroflex vs. dental contrast system.

Some Finno-Ugric languages like Sami use contrasting palatal consonants, and I have to wonder about the possible influence of the proto-Finno-Ugric languages spoken in Russia before the Russians came on palatalization in Russian. Then there is the palatalization system in neighboring languages like Lithuanian and Polish.