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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Phoneme list needed!
In-Reply-To: mrouse@cdsnet.net's message of Sun, 07 Apr 1996 19:50:20 GMT
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Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 23:27:44 GMT
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In article <31681010.5699096@news.cdsnet.net> mrouse@cdsnet.net
(Michael A. Rouse) writes:

>I am looking for several phoneme listings for a constructed language project
>I'm playing around with. I'm not sure how many of these criteria will turn out
>to be useful, but I'm looking for any lists containing the following:

>The percentage of languages each phoneme appears in (the larger the number of
>languages looked at, the better).

This is easy to answer:  1/(number of languages in the world)

The _phoneme_ is a language-specific psychological construct, only definable by
the set of relations in which it occurs within the language in question.

What you really want is a list of _phones_, speech sounds irrespective of their
phonemic status.

>How often it appears in a language (a language might have a phoneme, but it
>might not be very common -- the "zh" in the English "azure" for example).

Phonemicity is Boolean:  A speech sound either is or is not a member of the set
of phonemes of a language.  Relative frequency has nothing to do with whether
it is a phoneme, although it might well have a bearing on the following:

>"Perceptual distance" from other phonemes (how different does it sound?).

>How difficult is it to say? (Some phonemes seem to cause more than their share
>of problems for children and those learning them as a second language.)

I've encountered the same claim in introductory linguistics courses, but I'm no
longer so certain it is correct.  Perception clearly leads production here, so
do we want to say that a speech sound is phonemic for a child only when she can
produce it, or much earlier, when she can discriminate vocabulary based on its
presence (vs. other phonemes)?

>How well each combines with other phonemes (How many phonemes can it attach
>to? How many phonemes can attach to it? And how common is each?).

Again, phonotactics, like the rest of phonology, is language-specific.  How are
we to compare in any reasonable way, e. g., the differences in restrictions on
initial consonant clusters in Finnish and Georgian?

The system of phonemes in a language is more than a simple Huffman encoding.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
