Re: Phoneme distribution

> It is quite common to see tables of how different letters are distributed
> in typical texts of a given language, but have there been any similar
> investigations regarding phonemes of the spoken language?
Not of one language.  I've seen analysis of the frequency of phonemes
*across* languages (the UPSID data).


> There are a few things I am particularly curious about, such as whether
> the various phonemes of a language typically follow some sort of pattern.
> If, for instance, any given phoneme typically occurs in between 1% and 45%
> of the words of a language (this example is, of course, total nonsense).
Yes, this can happen.  Which is why when I was releasing an update of
LangMaker/Win language creation software I added the capability for people
to weight particular phonemes to occur more often.


> Or if diphtongs (when a language has such) are usually much less frequent
> than single vowels, etc. (Hmm... perhaps a diphtong would count as a
> morpheme rather than a phoneme? Oh, well, you know what I mean.)
Don't know about this one.

Best regards,

Jeffrey Henning
http://www.LangMaker.com/ - Invent Your Own Language
http://www.Jeffrey.Henning.com/
"If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed....  Oh, wait, he
does!"