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 COM.on C.A.2:e7/42-51
Online published on Nov.
27, 2008.
REPORT
Diversity Analyses on the Basic Vowel Qualities among the Human Languages
LI Hui
MOE Key Laboratory of Contemporary Anthropology, School of Life Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433 China;
Laboratory for Human Polymorphism Studies, Department of Genetics, School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven CT06520 USA
ABSTRACT: Among
the phonemes of human languages, vowels are much simpler than
consonents and tones in structure, and therefore providing convenience
of diversity analyses. Here basic vowel qualities of 621
languages/dialects were collected from the major linguistic families in
the world. The basic vowel quality inventories vary from 2 to 20, and
distributed unequally among the geographic regions. In the mass, the
vowel inventories are mostly high in Eurasia and low in the Americas
and Australia. The Germanic languages and Wu Chinese dialects have the
highest vowel quality inventories. After digitizing the vowel
qualities, the diversity of vowel quality systems of the world
languages was analyzed by the method of NETWORK, which is usually
applied to the mitochondrial DNA diversity in genetics. The network of
the world vowel systems exhibits a single center expansion pattern,
with the most common five-vowel system (aeiou) in the center,
indicating that five-vowel system might be the most original vowel
system of human languages. Different ways of complication or
simplification from the five-vowel system might have resulted in the
other types of vowel systems. The digitization of the phonemes will
help in developing the field of linguistic statistics.
Key words: Vowel quality; Diversity; NETWORK analysis; Geographic distribution
Recieved: Nov.24,2008 Accepted: Nov.27,2008 Corresponding: LiHui.Fudan@gmail.com
Full text:
[PDF]
Supplement table 1 The basic vowel systems of the major languages in the world [XLS]
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