Re: where do so many tenses come from?

In article <dpq1s9ylqnat$.ipisr5swxs5u$.dlg@xxxxxxxxxx>,
Joachim Pense <spam-collector@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Am Tue, 04 Apr 2006 08:05:41 +0800 schrieb Lee Sau Dan:

So? Language A has a smaller stock of phonemes, but it has higher
information content per phoneme.

This is a counter-example against your intuitive claim.

OK, you got me here. My average is just a first-order approximation, you'll
have to compute the entropy of the language to get the full truth.

But my argument was in relation to two people disagreeing about if the
information per phoneme rises or falls if the number of phonemes to choose
from rises. By your argument, both can happen if you choose the
distributions appropriately. But looking at the problem on the level it was
stated, assuming that the phonemes are roughly evenly distributed, you'd
expect that the information per phoneme rises when their number rises.

But phonemes aren't roughly evenly distributed in languages; every
phoneme distribution I've ever seen has been extremely skewed. I
wouldn't be surprised if phoneme distribution followed something like
Zipf's Law (and I'm sure computational linguists could be more
informative here).

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Question About Lingustic Notation
    ... language) and phonemic representations of words. ... in English the phoneme /p/ has ... ancient Greek pas pan for all, ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Literary phonetic alphabet
    ... When a writing system is newly devised, ... be to assign one symbol to one phoneme. ... While the language is changing, however, its ... English, is that spelling was pretty much fixed by the later 17th ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Literary phonetic alphabet
    ... be to assign one symbol to one phoneme. ... While the language is changing, however, its ... English, is that spelling was pretty much fixed by the later 17th ... But I'm not talking about a phonemic alphabet. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Literary phonetic alphabet
    ... be to assign one symbol to one phoneme. ... While the language is changing, however, its ... English, is that spelling was pretty much fixed by the later 17th ... alphabet, for informal purposes. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: accents
    ... > symbol for a phoneme, ... >> There is stuff to be learned about language by asking people to ... > I think that means you're not interested in linguistics, then, since ... > occurrence of a mid central vowel phone that occurs in your speech by ...
    (sci.lang)
Quantcast