[Corpora-List] Phonemes of primitive languages

[Vlado Keselj]

On Sat, 4 Dec 2010, Yuri Tambovtsev wrote:

> Dear colleagues, can we think that in primitive that is seminal 
> languages the speech sounds were also simple? I compared the frequency 
> of occurrence of speech sounds of some 300 languages which I have in my 
> phonetics corpora and came to the conclusion that simple phonemes occur 
> more frequently and in more world languages. Is there any law under it 
> or is it just a chance? And what is a chance in a language speech chain? 
> Looking forward to hearing from you to yutamb at mail.ru Be well, Yuri 
> Tambovtsev, Novosibirsk

There could be something similar to the Zipf's law.  I believe that in his
PhD thesis, Zipf postulated that his law is more universal than a
relation between word ranks and their frequencies in a text, and that it
was a consequence of minimization of human effort required in
communication.

--Vlado

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