Re: Using word generators (was Re: Semitic root word list?)

Alex Fink wrote:
> Then this might lead to the situation where there's some phoneme that
appears very often among common words and not often among rare ones, or
vice versa, which is a pretty unnaturalistic situation.

On the contrary, I would guess that this is the norm for such things,
just as morphological irregularity tends to be lost more easily the less
frequent the word. The Arabic example fits this pattern (and maybe
German /tS/ in 'Deutsch' is sufficiently unusual in the rest of the
lexicon to count too...?). I suppose a single very-high-frequency word
could support the persistence of the phoneme in more obscure words.

> Well, maybe it's not that unnaturalistic; I guess you could justify
this kind of variation in phone frequency by saying the less common
group of words are borrowings from a language with a different
distribution.

Again, I would argue precisely the converse - I would rather justify the
appearance of an unusual phoneme in a low-frequency word by (more or
less synchronic) borrowing. The first example to come to mind would be
initial /sf/ in English (a cluster, not a phoneme, but the analogy
holds), which is restricted AFAIK to a small group of low-frequency
Greek loans. I'm sure there are examples of languages with phonemes
restricted to loans, of which some probably only occur in unusual and
even perhaps ad-hoc loans, but I don't know any off the top of my head.
(Urdu from Arabic? Welsh from English?)

Can anyone bring more data to this question?

Jonathan.

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