Bendrinės lietuvių kalbos garsų dažnumas

Abstract

The frequencies of Lithuanian phonemes and letters have been extensively studied and described, whereas studies of the frequencies of Lithuanian phones have not received so much attention. The present study aims at describing frequencies of Lithuanian phones in contemporary speech. In this study, complex diphthongs (ie, uo) and affricates (c, č, dz, dž) are considered to be separate indivisible phonemic segments (independent phonemes), and the second constituent of the compound diphthongs (ai, au, ei, ui, ou, oi) is treated as a vowel (i, u). Experimental data consists of nearly 108 thousand of phonological words which are made up of 74 920 phone entities. Experimental data was prepare by automatically stressing, syllabifying and phonetically transcribing various texts. Software tool developed at VMU were used for this purpose Phonetic transcription took into account phonetic properties of standard Lithuanian such as consonan assimilation, gemination, word–initial and word–closing pronunciation regularities. The investigations showed that monophthongs make up 89 % of all phones. Vowels and consonant make up 36 % and 53 % of all monophthongs respectively. Other phones (11 %) may have different functional interpretations. They are complediphthongs (1,7 %), affricates (1 %), compoundiphthongs (3,4 %), and semi–diphthongs (4,6 %). Consonants (including monophthongs, the second constituent of semi–diphthongs, and affricates) are 1,2 times more frequent than vowels (including monophthongs, complex diphthongs, the first and the second constituent of compound diphthongs and the first constituent of semi–diphthongs). Front and back vowels are equally frequently pronounced. High and low vowels are almost equally frequently pronounced too. High and low vowels make up four fifths of all vowels whereas mid vowels make up less than one fifth of all vowels. [...]