Re: Analyzing Phonology

Arthaey Angosii wrote:
> 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?
Also, don't forget that frequency may be different between a listing of
vocabulary and in actual text.  /D/ is a fairly uncommon sound as far as
number of words that contain it, however, in actual speech it's fairly
common because it's used in such common words as "the", "that", "this",
"they", etc.

> 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/?
It has nothing to do with allophones.  The frequency of a phoneme can
vary by place.  For example, /N/ is non-existant in English in
syllable-initial position.  /m/ is more common in syllable-initial
position than in syllable-final position (especially when *not* followed
by another labial)

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