Tuesday, October 24, 2006
phonetic biases across language families
would have imagined that the frequency of distribution of phonemes/sounds across languages should be relatively identical. the reason being that i would imagine that there is little genetic variation in the structural makeup of vocal chords and other sound producing entities, which would imply that the sounds which are easiest to produce would find their way into a significant portion of the vocabulary to minimize the difficulty of communication. strangely i observe that different language families have very different probability distributions ( far-east have a lot of "n", middle-east have a lot of "h" etc) .. wonder if there is any linguistic/genetic basis for these or am i just imagining things? strongly suspect the latter (finding observations to fit hypothesis to justify the hypothesis :-) )
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which would imply that the sounds which are easiest to produce would find their way into a significant portion of the vocabulary to minimize the difficulty of communication.
May be there is too much dependence on "initial values" - once they learn one or two sounds they develop based on them.
I sometimes wonder if American english has even one vowel sound that is not a very very complex diphthong. There shouldn't be much genetic influence because ABCDs who don't know their mother tongues would find Indian pronunciation difficult.
Also, atleast in the case of sanskrit, the formal attempts to define sounds might have made a difference - eg. when you read shAkuntaLam wherein the uppercaste men speak sanskrit and the women and lower castes speak a certain prAkRt - one can clearly see that a prAkRt sentence is not very different from being a simplified way to pronounce the corresponding sanskrit sentence - corrupt the letters that are hard to pronounce ( when I read it it seemed to me that that prAkRt was almost sanskrit spoken with a mallu accent :-)) )
Further, atleast initially there might have been tendencies to imitate the sounds of nature, which of course is heavily dependent on geography.
"ABCDs who don't know their mother tongues would find Indian pronunciation difficult."
"simplified way to pronounce"
-- the question of pronunication is very different from the question of the probability distribution -- pronuniciation involves a lot of second-order and tertiary effects, which i imagine the overall frequency distribution to be relatively robust to!
I do know that what you might consider to be an easy sound to produce, needn't be easy for someone else. Perhaps the only sounds that are universally easy are the vowels. They aren't too few of them to make a language.
The learning of the phonemes happens sometime in the childhood(somewhere between 2 and 3, if I remember correctly) and isn't genetic. Japanese kids, for example, can distinguish between "r" and "l" as kids but lose this ability as their japanese specific abilities get better. An Indian child can possibly pick up the "click" sounds in African languages just as easily as an African child, if exposed to it early enough.
By Indian pronunciation being difficult, for instance, I meant that the ABCD will have to train his vocal chords quite a bit to pronounce some sounds that an Indian would find easy. Once you pick a sound up it becomes easy and most other sounds still remain difficult. It is not as if they explore a lot of sounds and optimize for efficiency, nor is it as if the a select set of easier sounds naturally come to the vocal chords of people learning to speak. Which is why the dependence on "initial values" for a certain civilization - whether produced by randomly imitating certain sounds in nature or artificially defined as in sanskrit.
P. S. : Your word verification always cribs at my first attempt irrespective of whether I enter the word correctly or not.
Oh dear god!
"sounds which are easiest to produce would find their way into a significant portion of the vocabulary to minimize the difficulty of communication."
There is an enormous range of sounds that the vocal cords are capable of producing. Any individual language incorporates a very small subset. The chances that different languages will end up with the same subset is zero.
"i observe that different language families have very different probability distributions"
Indeed. You can find mainstream languages where the majority of sounds in each are not even present in the other.
"wonder if there is any linguistic/genetic basis"
No genetic basis at all. None. Genetics simply doesn't work like that. What phonemes you end up with is mostly just historical accident.
"May be there is too much dependence on "initial values" - once they learn one or two sounds they develop based on them."
This is correct. aka, clustering tendency.
"I sometimes wonder if American english has even one vowel sound that is not a very very complex diphthong."
What?? This is simply wrong. Most vowels in American are not diphthongs. Why would you think that? AAVE (Ebonics) and Southern have a tendency to convert many monophthongs into diphthongs, but still probably not the majority.
"corrupt the letters that are hard to pronounce"
I'd prefer to think of it as making the sounds less pretentious and wantonly complicated.
"Further, atleast initially there might have been tendencies to imitate the sounds of nature, which of course is heavily dependent on geography."
This is correct. Onametopia (sp?) played a heavy role in language evolution. (Chomsky's breakthrough theory.) I don't see why it would be different for different peoples though.
"The learning of the phonemes happens sometime in the childhood(somewhere between 2 and 3, if I remember correctly)"
Correct. I have at least one friend born in America but didn't learn to speak much English until she was 6 or so. Consequently, she retains her Chinese accent into adulthood.
"P. S. : Your word verification always cribs at my first attempt irrespective of whether I enter the word correctly or not."
This is because you write such long posts that the token expires by the time you're done :)
At the risk of being boorish, it is worth repeating: there are no genetic biases whatsoever.
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