[YG Conlang Archives] > [engelang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
On 16 Dec 2014 04:33, "pkroser57@hidden.email [engelang]" <engelang@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
> I'm still trying to assess an easily calculated way to measure robustness
>
> - Laver did a 0-100 scale for English phonemes, with acoustically similar
>
> sounds, such as |p| and |k| about 15 units apart (which I think was the
>
> smallest interval), but i don't know how he calculated the distances.
>
>
> One paper I perused (I think it was by Clements) seemed to indicate that
>
> phonemic contrasts are more robust than phonetic ones, so perhaps a
>
> combination of distinctive feature matrix and acoustic data (formant
>
> frequencies, perhaps) could yield a robustness metric. But so far I
>
> haven't found any examples of this approach in the literature.
>
>
> I'm still working through the consonant inventories of the 100 most widely
>
> spoken languages, though this list tends to skew heavily toward Indo-
>
> European languages, with Standard / Mandarin Chinese at the top of the
>
> list and only a few non-IE languages in the top 50.
>
>
> My best guess is that an optimal vowel system would be between 5 and
>
> 8 vowels, with 5 = {i, e, a, o, u} and 8 = {i, y, e, ø, ɯ, u, a, o}, while the
>
> optimal phoneme inventory will probably be between 25 and 50 consonants.
>
>
> More to follow...
An interesting start, which prompts me to reflect that there are different sorts of debility (i.e. unrobustness). On the one hand there is auditory similarity, such as between [d]:[n], and [s]:[f], to give examples we know from our experience with English. You could have lots of vowel contrasts before their discriminability starts to become comparably debile, yet vowels have a different sort of debility, stemming from a lack of phonetic categoricality, which allows phoneme--phone correspondences to drift easily across lects. Thus one sort of debility is vulnerable to noise or other channel impairment (such as telephone) and the other sort is vulnerable to interlectal variation.
--And.