Re: Consonant phoneme frequency.

* Steven Williams said on 2005-06-04 05:53:55 +0200
> Are there any good sources I could use for finding out
> the approximate frequency of given consonant classes
> in languages?
The frequency of letters in English was the basis for morse code, the
most frequent letter, 'e', is also the easiest to tap.

See GENERAL NATURE OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE here:
http://www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/coding/379/lesson1.htm

More about frequencies in Enlish:
http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutwords/frequency?view=uk

Unless you're making a language that is to sound like English, the
frequencies of letters in your language must be different than given in
the links above.

> Y'see, what I'm trying to do is to make a realistic
> lexicon that won't overuse one class of consonants.
[..]
> Eventually, every word begins to sound like [lwa:i]
> and ["nai.ja] when I do it by the 'babble in random
> syllables and write down what sounds nice' method :).
Get/make a frequency counter. I put all the headwords in my lexicon in a
single file then run my home-made a frequency-counter on 'em, that way I
quickly discover which sounds are underused and can see if the overall
frequencies slope properly:

*

 *
  *
    * *********
ast e ...

Hard to make in ascii but you get the idea. My frequency-analyser is at
http://taliesin.nvg.org/conlang/software/freq.html

Note however that since you do it on all words in the dictionary it
won't reflect the frequency of a text, as there the letters in the most
frequent words will muck up things. A reason "e" is so frequent in
English is "the" and "-ed" for instance, and "s" is frequent because
there's usually at least one in every sentence, on a noun or on a verb.


t.

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