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Re: Analyzing Phonology

From:Arthaey Angosii <arthaey@...>
Date:Saturday, January 25, 2003, 10:22
Emaelivpar Dirk Elzinga:
>If you have enough vocabulary to get >meaningful numbers, finding out how frequent different sounds are
What's "enough"? In a statistics course we were taught minimum sample size was 40, but that really sounds _minimum_ for this application. I currently have the newest 300 words typed into Shoebox, with at least that number again of older words in dead tree form only. Should part of speech be correlated against any of these variables you mentioned, btw? Vao'"frequency counts" kao:
>be sure to take the phonetic context into account >when looking at that kind of thing; that is, the figures for "p" in syllable >initial position should be distinguished from "p" in syllable final >position, and so forth.
Is this true even when [p] and [p_h] are both allophones rather than phonemes, as in English /p/? As for actually doing this, is there a good methodology besides the Butt-In-Chair method? ;) Ie, is there some helpful way of organizing things or a certain order of operations that makes phonological analysis easier/better? -- AA

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Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>