UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database

The phoneme inventory (also: phonological inventory) a natural language is comprised of the set of phonemes used by the language. Phonemes are the smallest meaningful units of a distinctive spoken language. Each language has its own phonemes. Each phoneme is based on a phonemic system, which can be determined on the basis of the phonological features of the phonemes.

All languages ​​have both consonants and vowels in their phoneme inventory. These are referred to as consonant and vowel phonemes corresponding.

Size of Phoneminventaren

The size of the Phoneminventare the known languages ​​is very different.

The size of consonant inventories ranging from six in Rotokas ( a papua new guinea African language ) up to 122 consonants in! XOo ( a Khoisan language ). The average consonant inventory includes 22.7 phonemes. Especially small consonant inventories are mainly found in languages ​​from New Guinea and the Amazon basin, particularly large inventories can be found especially in languages ​​of Africa south of the equator, and in languages ​​that are spoken in north- western North America.

The size of vowel inventories ranging from only two vowels in Yimas ( also a papua new guinea African language ) up to 14 in German. On average, a vowel inventory includes about eight phonemes. In American languages ​​are found more often than average small vowel inventories of three or four phonemes, also Australian languages ​​are often limited to a small inventory. In African Languages ​​large vowel inventories dominate (this seems the preference for vowel harmony in the Niger -Congo, Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic languages ​​to be related ). Also in languages ​​of Southeast Asia and European languages ​​is above average number of vowel phonemes. The large number of vowels in the German explained by the fact that contrasts have changed in the vowel length contrasts in the vowel quality.

There is a correlation between the size of the speech community and the size of Phoneminventaren languages ​​that are spoken by many people also tend to have larger Phoneminventare. The size of Phoneminventaren tends to decrease with greater distance from Africa; this is interpreted as the founder effect and, seen as confirmation of the out- of-Africa hypothesis, which locates the origin of humanity in Africa.

Isolation procedures

The identification and isolation of the individual phonemes is the task of phoneme analysis. It determines the phonemes in the phonetics laboratory using classification and segmentation. In Europe it is mainly the method of the Prague School to the course, are formed in the phonetic minimal pairs. The distinguishing features of individual phonemes are analyzed by the opposition. The U.S. taxonomic linguistics mainly used the commutation test to determine relationships and differences between the phonemes in the word formation ( syntagmatic and paradigmatic variations of phonemes ) and isolate it.

Collections

The Phoneminventare collected since 1984 in the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database ( UPSID ). So far, the phonetic inventories are listed from 451 individual languages ​​in the database. It contains 921 different phonemes, 652 consonants and 269 vowels. These are weighted with respect to their linguistic relationship to each other. For example, the differences of a single West Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family over can be evaluated. Founding father of UPSID is the phonetician Ian Maddieson of the University of California, Los Angeles ( UCLA).

Another database is the Stanford Phonological Archive (SPA), which represents 196 individual languages.

Sound system - phonemic / asset

The sound systems are the subject of phonetics; you have to distinguish them from the Phonemsystemen / inventories. Not all speech sounds and not all of their phonetic features are phonologically significant. In German, for example, the aspiration ( aspiration ) of plosives is phonetically important, but not phonologically. The same applies to the so-called glottal stop, which is usually regarded as a purely phonetic phenomenon which phonologically but this is not relevant.