Publications
Publication details [#30613]
Pericliev, Vladimir and Raúl E. Valdés-Pérez. 2002. Differentiating 451 languages in terms of their segment inventories. Studia Linguistica 56 (1) : 1.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
Blackwell Publishers
Associates, Inc.
ISBN
0039-3193
Journal WWW
Annotation
This paper presents the computer-generated segment niches for the 451 languages of the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database. Although languages usually possess a range of segment niches, not all of these are equally representative of a the idiosyncrasy of a language. As criterion for choosing among these alternatives, it is suggested to prefer the language niche containing segments with the smallest frequencies of occurrence in other languages.