Re: Phonotactics of languages

[Satrajit S Ghosh <satra@xxxxxx>]

Dear Tsth,

I think the overlap (or the lack thereof) of phonemes(*) across languages
is an interesting issue by itself. If one could categorize phonemes from a
purely acoustic perspective across languages, I would hypothesize that the
union of this set would reflect a large percentage of the phonetic
structure of most non-tonal languages.

I am interested particularly in American English and how acoustically
perceivable sounds containing sequences of phonemes not present in the
language are produced from a neural control standpoint.

Satra

(*) The notion of a phoneme is greatly debated and I dont want to quite
get into it. I just want to keep it simple and mean the smallest
acoustically dissociable units that comprise a language.

-----Original Message-----
From: Tsth Laszls [mailto:tothl@inf.u-szeged.hu]
Sent: Friday, February 01, 2002 3:54 AM
To: Satrajit S Ghosh
Cc: AUDITORY@lists.mcgill.ca
Subject: Re: Phonotactics of languages


On Thu, 31 Jan 2002, Satrajit S Ghosh wrote:

> I am looking for a source that describes phonotactics of languages. In
> particular, I am interested in phoneme clusters that are not permissible
> in American English but are allowed in other languages.
>
What about the special case that certain phonemes do not exist in one
language or the other? For example, I think that the vowel set of most
European languages differs from that of English.

               Laszlo Toth
        Hungarian Academy of Sciences         *
  Research Group on Artificial Intelligence   *   "Failure only begins
     e-mail: tothl@inf.u-szeged.hu            *    when you stop trying"
     http://www.inf.u-szeged.hu/~tothl        *