Why woud they? I don’t think that’s a natural rule of language. Can you name any natural language that has its phonemes evenly distributed?
And, anyway, what are you counting? Words in a dictionary? Why? Deciding what is and isn’t a word is somewhat arbitrary. Also, why not adjust for frequency of the use of a word?
Also, why are you going by spelling instead of sound?
Also, why is the start of a word so significant? There are some phonemes that can’t start words, like /ŋ/ in English
The nattering nabobs of negativity think William Safire had more to do with that than Agnew.
Naive: “deficient in worldly wisdom or informed judgment”.
I can’t believe I missed posting this earlier. For the OP:
That doesn’t explain anything. Why should a naive person assume that sounds are distributed evenly, as opposed to unevenly, across a language. Chances are that the naive person’s own native language—something which E would hardly be ill-informed about—wouldn’t have evenly distributed sounds. Why should a naive person assume either way?
Using naive not as a pejorative, but as a qualitative indication of knowledge, I would expect that a flat distribution is the most naive theory possible. Once you go past that, you are adding new ideas or knowledge about the subject. Presented with the idea that this is a natural language, personally I would guess a power law distribution. But I’m already bringing domain knowledge to the table. An alien may make a whole set of different assumptions about the nature of a symbolic language. Efficiency of coding would lead one to expect a flat distribution. That doesn’t fit well with an evolving language. Maybe our alien visitors have reached the Highest Possible Level of Development, and have long since abandoned such frivolities.
Thank you, Francis. You said it a lot better than I could.
[quote=“Francis_Vaughan, post:65, topic:940708”]I would expect that a flat distribution is the most naive theory possible.
[/quote]
I would expect the most naive theory possible would be no theory at all.
Would we make such assumptions about an alien language? Or are we assuming that the alien’s naïveté extends to being unaware of the concept of language itself?
Depends how alien we think they are. Little green men is one end of the spectrum. A super intelligent shade of blue another. The entire idea of phonemes and mapping of a spoken language to letters may be quite a surprise to them. It isn’t as if every human language works this way, so why aliens might not have such expectations is hardly a surprise. How might you expect Egyptian hieroglyphics to be managed? Or pictogram based languages? Aliens that can’t talk with aural mechanisms would probably be totally bemused by our written language and why it is the way it is.
In such cases I wouldn’t expect an alien—naïve or otherwise—to have any particular stance on the distribution of letters or phonemes that would result in surprise.
Assuming that they have some equivalent of language and some equivalent of recoding that language into a different medium of communication, then they might or might not assume the distribution of coding segments would be similar to theirs but in neither case would I assume that they would be surprised to be proven wrong.
If they had no equivalent of language then I would expect that they would use the first human language they encountered as their basis for comparison.
I’m not seeing how a naïve alien could be expected to have any particular assumption, no more than a naïve human.
I agree. I think we only disagree about what constitutes a base theory on any distribution. I take the view that the moment you assume the existence of a thing that can have a distribution you are positing some form of prior against which you judge subsequent knowledge. That would be a flat distribution.
An alien getting a stream of written human communication might see a pile of stuff go past, and at some point say, “Hmmm, that distribution does not meet the assumption of flat. This is interesting.” Flat is what I would call the naive hypothesis. It is the one you look to be challenged by a different distribution. You might have a set of possible new hypotheses for the distribution, but not be able say which one is favoured, but you may at least know that there is a significant probability that the distribution is not flat. That is a useful start.
There’s probably onomatopoeia at work there.
Just as a matter of idle trivia, one might ask the related question "why are there so few IATA airport codes in the US that start with “N”? Some of the codes are based on the airport name rather than the city (Chicago’s major airport = ORD for “O’Hare Field”), but others seem to be working hard to avoid the “N”:
Newark (NY) - EWR
Nantucket - ACK
Nashua (NH) - ASH
New Haven (CT) - HVN
The reason? Some attempt was made to reserve the “N” for Navy (and some Marine) air bases within the US, although “N” is freely used in the rest of the world. But it wasn’t wholly successful as there are still US civilian airports with IATA codes beginning with “N”. But far fewer than one would expect.
Thanks for that. Ignorance fought:
Agnew, who wasn’t particularly erudite, didn’t come up with the words himself. They were penned by GOP speechwriter William Safire for an address Agnew gave at the California Republican Convention in San Diego on Sept. 11, 1970.
Agnew said quite a few alliterative phrases and they all came from Safire.
Some politicians are gifted with oratorical skills but broadly you can always assume that any speeches or writing start out with staff and the politician polishes (and sometimes sees it for the first time). They couldn’t fit it in between calls to donors otherwise.
In the same broad sense, you can assume that all books written by celebrities start out - and something end with - ghostwriters.
It’s not quite as true today, but for most of the 19th and 20th centuries you could assume that any quote in a newspaper was invented by and certainly improved by a reporter or editor before it saw print. Magazine articles by celebrities were also written by staff.
I guess you could say that the naive assumption is that words can always be attributed to the name attached to them. My cynical take is that words from non-professionals can never be attributed to the name attached to them unless proven otherwise.
I of course have a Marx Brothers example. Harpo did not write Harpo Speaks. Groucho did write Groucho and Me: he had been writing since the 1920s. That made it more plausible when his son Arthur came out with Life with Groucho, which had numerous snarky footnotes by Groucho. He didn’t write one of them; Arthur invented them all.
You can enlarge the count substantially if you allow for species which have night, north or northern as prefixes to their names. And as a point of order nematodes are rather common.
Australian aborigines seem to use “N” in a higher proportion than used in English
Nabarlek
Nail-tail wallaby
Ningaui
Ningbing
Northern quoll
(and a whole lot of other “Northern”'s)
Notamacropus
Numbat
Night parrot
Nangur skink
In defense of n, there are few phrases in popular music as evocative as na, na-na na na, na-na-na-na, na-na-na, na-na-na.
It does facilitate clear understanding when people make reference to “the N-word.”
If somebody said “the S-word,” I’d be lost.
So … there’s that.
Snigger?
Just out of curiosity (why is there no ‘u’ in…aw, nevermind) are you a fan of the NY Times Spelling Bee? It wasn’t until I got addicted to that puzzle that I noticed how useless the letter ‘n’ was for making words.
Yes, I play it every day and have since April of this year. But I’ve been observant of things alphabetical for much longer than that, so it was not a surprise that N is a relatively rare initial letter, despite it being the second most common consonant in English. Just look at the size of the N section of the dictionary compared with other letters.
PS Don’t forget natant, when doing the Spelling Bee. Don’t know what it means, but it shows up a lot.
PPS Don’t bother to tell me what it means. I have a dictionary and could look it up if I wanted. It’s a valid word for the game and that’s all I need to know.