The Euclidean metrics applied to the interphonemic distance measurements

Abstract

The similarity or dissimilarity of the spoken words is generally rendered by intuition, depending on the personal orientation or the personal traits of a listener/speaker. The existing methods of phonetic encoding of words suffer from a number of shortcomings, the main one being the impossibility of weighing spoken words in quantitative terms. Moreover, the existing methods may be related to a certain language or language family. The algorithm advanced in the present paper compares the characteristics of different phonemes that make up a word. The paper treats phonemic frequency and sonority as elements common both for consonants and vowels, backness and openness, as features pertaining to vowels, and the place of articulation pertaining to consonants only. The algorithm in question permits to compare in quantitative terms the words of different length, whether formed by open or closed syllables. The inter-phonemic distances are calculated by employing Euclidean metrics. The paper suggests fields of application of the method treated in the paper: this scheme can be applied in the fields of comparative linguistics, in medicine, when the hearing disorders are scrutinized, as well as in the brain cortex mapping.