tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Redundancy Ratio: An Invariant Property of the Consonant Inventories of the World’s Languages"

In this paper, we put forward an information theoretic definition of the redundancy that is observed across the sound inventories of the world’s languages. Through rigorous statistical analysis, we find that this redundancy is an invariant property of the consonant inventories. The statistical analysis further unfolds that the vowel inventories do not exhibit any such property, which in turn points to the fact that the organizing principles of the vowel and the consonant inventories are quite different in nature. . | Redundancy Ratio An Invariant Property of the Consonant Inventories of the World s Languages Animesh Mukherjee Monojit Choudhury Anupam Basu Niloy Ganguly Department of Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur animeshm monojit anupam niloy @ Abstract In this paper we put forward an information theoretic definition of the redundancy that is observed across the sound inventories of the world s languages. Through rigorous statistical analysis we find that this redundancy is an invariant property of the consonant inventories. The statistical analysis further unfolds that the vowel inventories do not exhibit any such property which in turn points to the fact that the organizing principles of the vowel and the consonant inventories are quite different in nature. 1 Introduction Redundancy is a strikingly common phenomenon that is observed across many natural systems. This redundancy is present mainly to reduce the risk of the complete loss of information that might occur due to accidental errors Krakauer and Plotkin 2002 . Moreover redundancy is found in every level of granularity of a system. For instance in biological systems we find redundancy in the codons Lesk 2002 in the genes Woollard 2005 and as well in the proteins Gatlin 1974 . A linguistic system is also not an exception. There is for example a number of words with the same meaning synonyms in almost every language of the world. Similarly the basic unit of language the human speech sounds or the phonemes is also expected to exhibit some sort of a redundancy in the information that it encodes. In this work we attempt to mathematically capture the redundancy observed across the sound 104 more specifically the consonant inventories of the world s languages. For this purpose we present an information theoretic definition of redundancy which is calculated based on the set of features1 Trubetzkoy 1931 that are used to express the consonants. An interesting .