Over 50% of US Englsih words on a page are subject to accents

Amy West medievalist at W-STS.COM
Wed Nov 14 13:59:32 UTC 2012


On 11/14/12 12:02 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
> Date:    Tue, 13 Nov 2012 21:38:31 +0000
> From:    Tom Zurinskas<truespel at HOTMAIL.COM>
> Subject: Over 50% of US Englsih words on a page are subject to accents
>
> I looked at the top 5k words of English and their frequency counts.  These words make up about 90% of a text page.  Then I looked at ways in USA English that phonemes could be spoken differently by accent in terms of phoneme swaps and drops.  The results show that over 50% of the words are subject to phoneme swaps or drops.  Seehttp://screenr.com/BVH7.
>
> Various individual accents would have subsets of these affects, but these data can't be used for subsets because multiple instances of affects in words are not counted.  Let me know of any other data corresponding to this.
Dude,

EVERYONE has an "accent." Therefore ALL "English words on a page" are
"subject to accents."

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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