[Corpora-List] Phonemes of primitive languages

[Rich Cooper]

The minimum description length work on compression and learning, especially
the AIXI paper in some AAAI publication, describes a combination linear and
discrete model of a learner that should be something akin to Zipf's
insights.

-Rich
 
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2

-----Original Message-----
From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [mailto:corpora-bounces at uib.no] On Behalf Of
Vlado Keselj
Sent: Friday, December 03, 2010 12:33 PM
To: Yuri Tambovtsev
Cc: corpora at uib.no
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Phonemes of primitive languages


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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