Re: [Re: [IE conlangs]]

Edward Heil wrote:

> Gary Shannon wrote:
> > English, at least, would appear to be very tolerant of variety in vowel
> > sounds.  Are other languages this tolerant, or are there languages in which
> > slight mispronunciations would confuse the meaning of a sentence?
> I imagine things are trickier in languages with much smaller phonetic
> inventories, like Chinese, which are forced to almost completely exploit their
> phonetic inventories.  You'd still have redundancy due to context in such
> languages, but much less built in phonetic redundancy.  But I'm no expert in
> Chinese!
In terms of the sheer number of syllables available in comparison to
English, this is true, of course. However, I do think there is a good
deal of phonetic redundancy in the language (if I've understood this
term correctly). I'm not going to run through the entire phonetic
inventory for you, but if we take the traditional Chinese analysis of
the initial consonants of Mandarin Chinese as:

b p m f
d t n l
g k h
j q x
zh ch sh r
z c s

then here are some syllables that are not exploited *at all*:

be pe fe (me is used, though sparsely)
fai (bai, pai, and mai all commonly used)
tei (dei, nei, and lei fairly commonly used)
kei (gei and hei sparsely used)
chei rei (zhei and shei used, but very limited)
fao (bao, pao, and mao all commonly used)
bou (mou is common, pou and fou are sparse)
cei sei (zei is sparse)

The syllables below are sparsely used; that is to say only one to three
or four characters are mapped to them. Many of these do not exist at all
in certain tones, so sen2, sen3, and sen4, for example, just don't
happen to be words in standard Mandarin (sen1 is used).

ga ka ha ca
me
nuo zhuo shuo ruo
zhai chai shai
zhei shei
pou fou nou
zei
cen sen
cou (all fourth tone)
beng

And as alluded to above, tone as a supraphonetic element adds to
phonetic redundancy. For example, "cong" has large morpheme inventories
in the first and second tone but absolutely zilch in the third and
fourth. "Yi" and "shi" are maxed out in all tones while "cou", as
mentioned above, occurs only in the fourth. And so on.

As a non-native speaker, I've always been amazed by the range you have
to allow for in Chinese for any given word. I see a high degree of
tolerance to variation here (even in tone sometimes, which is usually
presented as the sacred cow of Chinese -- one slight misstep in tone and
you "horse" becomes "hemp"). As a listener, you really have to keep an
open mind as to what you may be hit with as speaker input.

Kou