Structure of the Frequency of Occurrence of Consonants in the Speech Sound Chain as an Indicator of the Phono-Typological Closeness of Languages

Structure of the Frequency of Occurrence of Consonants
in the Speech Sound Chain as an Indicator of the Phono-Typological Closeness of
Languages

Yuri
Tambovtsev

Novosibirsk University
YUTAMB@HOTMAIL.COM

2002

University of Tübingen

Tübingen

ALLC/ACH 2002

editor

Harald
Fuchs

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

The structure of the frequency of occurrence of consonants in the speech sound
chain can be a good indicator of the typological closeness of languages from the
phonetic point of view.
A human being can realise that this or that language sounds closer to his own
native language without understanding the meaning. At the stage when it is hard
to teach computer to understand a human language, it is quite possible to make
it recognise the sound closeness of a language to this or that language on the
basis of the analysis of its sound speech chain. We have computed the frequency
of phonemic occurrence of 112 world languages as a teaching sample for the
computer. Then we took Japanese as a token language. The computer had to analyse
the sound chain of a language and then to put it closer to some languages and
far away from the others, basing on the frequency of occurrence of certain
consonantal groups. We have chosen Japanese because it is not categorically
assigned to any language family. It is still considered a genetically isolated
language. Therefore, it is useful to have some additional information about it
in any aspect. In this project we have used the procedures which are usually
used in pattern recognition.
Japanese, as any other human language, has a specific structure of the speech
sound chain. It can be distinguished by its structure from any other language.
Every language has a unique structure of distributions of speech sounds in its
phonemic chain. The distribution of Japanese vowels will not be considered till
the second stage of the investigation. Let's point out that consonants bear the
semantic load in the word, not vowels. Therefore, it is more possible to
understand the meaning of the message by consonants, rather by vowels. However,
if we fail to recognise and distinguish two languages, then we resort to the
structure of occurrence of vowels in the speech sound chain. While comparing
languages, it is necessary to keep to the principle of commensurability. Having
it in mind, it is not possible to compare languages on the basis of the
frequency of occurrence of separate phonemes, because the sets of phonemes in
languages are usually different. The articulartory features may serve as the
basic features in phono-typological reasoning. First of all, it is the
classification of consonants according to the work of the active organ of speech
or place of articulation (4 features). Secondly, it is the classification from
the point of view of the manner of articulation or the type of the obstruction
(3 features). Thirdly, it is the classification according to the work of the
vocal cords (1 feature). In this way, 8 basic features are obtained: 1) labial;
2) front; 3) mediolingual or palatal; 4) back or velar; 5) sonorant; 6)
occlusive; 7) fricative; and 8) voiced consonants. One should take the values of
the frequency of occurrence of these 8 features in the speech chain of Japanese
and compare them to those of the other languages. On the basis of the
"chi-square" test and Euclidean distance, we have developed our own method of
measuring the phono-typological distances between languages (Tambovtsev, 1994-a;
1994-b; 2001-a; 2001-b). It takes into account the frequency of occurrence of
the 8 consonantal groups mentioned above and builds up the overwhelming mosaic
of the language sound picture. Having compared Japanese to some languages, we
received the following phono-typological distances: Japanese - Ujgur (6.77);
Japanese - Nanaj (8.12); Japanese - Jakut (8.26); Japanese - See Dajak (8.86);
Japanese - Kazah (9.02); Japanese - Turkish (9.05); Japanese - Ket (9.52);
Japanese - Baraba Tatar (9.76); Japanese - Uzbek (10.63); Japanese - Hausa
(10.98); Japanese - Georgean (11.05); Japanese - Kazan Tatar (11.07) and so on.
One can see, that Ujgur, Jakut, Kazah, Turkish, Baraba Tatar, Uzbek and Kazan
Tatar are Turkic languages. Nanaj is a Tungus-Manchurian language. Therefore,
one can notice that Japanese is closer to the so-called Altaic languages which
include Turkic, Mongolian and Tungus-Manchurian languages. All in all 112
languages were compared to Japanese. We can't show all the distances measured
here for the lack of space. However, the maximum distances were found for
Japanese - German (22,24); Japanese - English (19.83); Japanese - Rumanian
(15,08) and Japanese - Swedish (17.03). Thus, one can see that the consonantal
distribution pattern in Japanese and Germanic languages is rather different. As
a conclusion, we can state that speech sound picture of Japanese is also far
away from the languages which are geographically close: Chinese, Nivh, Itelmen
or Indonesian. It was a surprise to us. Our data state that the speech sound
pattern of Japanese resembles that of Ujgur - one of the Turkic languages spoken
in the Middle Asia. The Ujgur people are often linked to the Old Turkic tribes,
who used to live in the stepps of Southern Russia before the Tatar-Mongols
captured them in the IXth century A.D. We must point out that it is not a
coincidence since the other native Altaic people have a very similar data of
closeness to Japanese. Turkic and Tungus-Manchurian tribes may have had a sort
of common origin with Japanese. It may verify the Altaic hypothesis of Japanese
origin. It is especially vivid, when the Austro-Oceanic and other languages do
not show such a closeness.

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