Частота встречаемости смычных согласных в некоторых языках мира как показатель степени смычности их звуковой цепочки

Abstract

It is still an enigma why some languages produce many occlusive consonants in their speech sound chains while others do not. Thus, some world languages may have many occlusive consonants in their sound speech chains, e.g. Nenets of the Samoyedic taxon – 22.67%. By occlusive consonants we mean the speech sounds which are produced by some sort of constriction in the human sound tract. The complete closure produces stop consonants. The occurrence of occlusive consonants were considered in different language subgroups, groups and families, that is language taxa. The taxon of the Samodian (Samoyedic) languages has a very high degree of the occurrence of stop consonants among the world languages under our study. The mean of occlusive consonants in Samoedic taxon is 26.74% while in the taxon of the Australian aboriginals the mean is only 19.49%. The least concentration is in the sound chain of the Samoan languages of the Austronesian language taxon. It is nearly twice less than the mean of occlusives in the other world languages. The occlusive data in every language taxon are compared to the other language taxa (groups and families) by the mean values.