Re: Saul's Phrase List Saul Epstein Thu, 06 Nov 1997 14:36:59 -0600 At 01:24 PM 11/6/97 -0600, Rob wrote: >At 12:23 PM 11/6/97 -0600, Saul wrote: > >>I find it kind of spooky that the phoneme distribution between those >>phrases and the lexicon should be at all similar, because the phrases >>make use of forms of probably less than 20 different words. This says a >>lot, as I had suspected, about the skew of the current lexicon. > >Yes, the fact that the small sample and the larger samples distribution >came out the same indicates a very skewed sample. However, any such >distribution of the phonemic inventory of a language should have some >skewes in favor of the sounds which make it distinctive. Of course. But when one vowel occurs almost twice as often the next most numerous phoneme, while 2/5 of the vowel inventory doesn't occur at all... I think we can safely say that ST writers, when working with Vulcan, imagine a lot of "ar"s and "or"s -- and apostraphes! >>We may need a temporary ban on /a/ and /r/ until things even out a bit. > >Well, lets wait abit make some more phrases and see how what the overall >sound seems like. I meant a ban on their inclusion in new words. Without new words, our phrases will tend to reflect the existing lexicon unless we are highly selective. -- from Saul Epstein liberty uit net www johnco cc ks us sepstein "Surak ow'phaaper thes'hi thes'tca'; thes'phaadjar thes'hi suraketca'." -- K'dvarin Urswhl'at