A cross-linguistic quantitative study of homophony*

Abstract Homophony is ubiquitous across languages. It is an important source of ambiguity which is a distinctive feature of human language. There have, however, been few quantitative investigations on questions such as “Do languages have similar degrees of homophony?”, “Can the degree of homophony in a language be predictable?” We report a preliminary attempt to answer these questions. We measure the degree of homophony of two sets of languages, one including twenty Chinese dialects and the other including three Germanic languages. It is found that there exists a strong correlation between the degree of homophony and the number of occurring syllable types (which can be taken as an estimation of the size of the phonological resource of a language), or the number of monosyllabic words in the lexicon. Furthermore, the distributional properties of homophony reflect some self-organization characteristics of language as a system, as illustrated by two pieces of evidence: the first is the correlation between the degree of homophony and the degree of disyllabification in Chinese dialects, and the second is the observation from some languages that pairs of words tend to exist in different grammatical classes, suggesting that language self-organizes in a way to decrease the chances of ambiguity.

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