Two phonemes that may induce minimal pairs constitute a phonemic contrast. Some phonemic contrasts may disappear for various reasons, which, nevertheless, does not seem to seriously impede linguistic communication. Does it mean that the disappeared phonemic contrasts are unimportant? In our study, we calculated the proportions (here termed degree of contrast) of minimal pairs to the words in which the two contrastive phonemes occur and explored the role of phonemic contrasts in the phonemic combinations. The degree of contrast of phonemes reflects the relation between phonemes. Our results indicate that (1) the average degree of contrast of Chinese phonemes declines exponentially with the increase in the number of syllables, rapidly approaching zero; (2) the average degree of contrast of Chinese consonants that differ from each other in only one distinctive feature and of the consonants that are absent in some Chinese dialects is significantly higher than that of other consonants; (3) the degree of contrast of Chinese consonants that differ from each other in only one distinctive feature is not significantly different from that of the consonants absent in some Chinese dialects; (4) Chinese phonemic combinations exhibit high degree of sparsity, which increases exponentially with the number of syllables and rapidly approaches 1. All these results show that the high degree of sparsity and the low degree of contrast of human languages not only leave enough room for new words, new dialects and new languages to appear but also contribute to effective and reliable communication, because a few phonemic mistakes are not likely to cause wrong decoding (sound recognition) and failed communication.

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© 2012 S. Karger AG, Basel
2012
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