das@ucla-cs.UUCP (02/11/86)
[Background: I was listening to the radio, and the DJ announced the next song, adding that the group that performed it was from Canada. "Canajun, eh?", I thought, and listened carefully for phonetic evidence, focussing primarily on what I, a native Angeleno, pronounce as /au/. There wasn't a single one in the entire song! No "out", "about", "house", nothing!] Anyone who has played around with cryptanalysis knows where to find single- letter, digraph, trigraph, etc. frequencies for English and some other Roman-alphabet European languages. Is there a source listing phoneme frequencies? From observation, it's clear that unvoiced "th" is just about the least frequent consonant in English, and that in my dialect, at least, the vowel in "caught" (which I distinguish from "cot"), "saw", and "ought" is probably the least frequent vowel. Is there any compilation of single-phoneme, diphthong, "diphone", "triphone", etc. frequencies for spoken English? Any dialect will do.