Phonometry

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The phonometry (from ancient Greek φωνή phone "sound, tone, voice, speech" and μέτρον métron " measure , scale") deals using statistical methods with the sounds of a language. It can be understood as a special form of phonetics ( phonology ). A basic idea was that a certain speech sound, spoken again and again, turns out measurably different, but scatters around a mean value, whereby this scatter can be represented with the Gaussian bell curve ( normal distribution ). The anthropometry and developed from biometrics , proved normally distributed in measurable human traits such as body size in larger groups as also gave rise to these considerations.

Science-historical background

The Rhine-Hessian doctor, ophthalmologist and medical historian Johann Hermann Baas (1838–1909) is considered to be the inventor of phonometry. He determined the resonance of air-containing parts of the body using a tuning fork. Modern phonometry (also: "quantitative phonetics") came into being in the 1930s as a result of the experimental phonetics of the time , which according to the phonetician Eberhard Zwirner and the mathematician Kurt Zwirner was too scientifically oriented. On the other hand, they took the view that phonetics had to pursue linguistic goals and therefore had to choose a linguistic approach. For Zwirner & Zwirner, this means that first the sounds that are to be examined must be determined, and only in a second step measurements and their statistical evaluation should take place. According to Heike (1972: 12), the aim of this work is “a statistical determination of norms of realization” which can be determined as mean values ​​of the normal distributions obtained for the individual sounds.

literature

  • Georg Heike : Phonology . Metzler, Stuttgart 1972. ISBN 3-476-10104-5
  • Eberhard Zwirner & Kennosuke Ezawa (eds.): Phonometrie, first-third part. Karger, Basel / New York 1966, 1968, 1969.
  • Eberhard Zwirner & Kurt Zwirner: Basic questions of phonometry . Metten, Berlin 1936. (2nd edition as Zwirner & Ezawa (eds.) Part I, 1966)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the diction of Herbert Pilch: Phonemtheorie. Second improved edition. Karger, Basel a. a. 1968, p. 143: "Phonometrie means the statistical treatment of phoneme variants." Approving mention as an independent research approach can be found by the well-known phonetician Otto von Essen: General and Applied Phonetics. 5th, revised and expanded edition. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1979, p. 7f.
  2. ↑ See e.g. B. Zwirner & Zwirner 1966: 200f.
  3. ^ Ralf Vollmuth : Baas, Johann Hermann. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 127.
  4. ↑ Zwirner & Zwirner 1966: 12
  5. ↑ Zwirner & Zwirner 1966: 4
  6. ↑ Zwirner & Zwirner 1966: 4
  7. ↑ Georg Heike : Phonemics of German . Metzler, Stuttgart 1972, p. 25. ISBN 3-476-10108-8

Web links

Wiktionary: phonometry  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations