Quoting Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>:
[snip]
> English has so much redundancy, in fact, that
> something in the neighborhood of 1.3 bits per
> character, on average, it all it takes to encode
> typical English text.
You'd have to multiply that with the average number of letters per phoneme
(which is gonna be noticeably hight than one for English) to get the bits per
phoneme count. And that's still only considering the information necessary to
get the phonemic sequence across; speech also encodes information in intonation
(which should be well-known to every long-time resident of a mailinglist; the
clues telling you "this is sarcasm" tend not to get transmitted!).
Andreas