Summary Details

Query:	Consonants vs. Vowels
Author:	gina cardillo
Submitter Email:	click here to access email
Linguistic LingField(s):	Phonology Text/Corpus Linguistics
Summary:	Regarding query: http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-3386.html#2 Thank you to those who responded to my query about the numbers of content words beginning with consonants vs vowels in English. I ended up using the MRC Psycholinguistics Database (http://www.psy.uwa.edu.au/mrcdatabase/uwa_mrc.htm). In the MRC database, I did a query of all phonetic transctiptions for each initial phoneme, and found: 7600 vowel- and dipthong-initial words 21,553 consonant-initial words, excluding L,R,Y,W 24,828 consonant-initial words, including L,R,Y,W So, based on these estimates, there are about 3 times as many consonant-initial words as vowel-intital words in English. This search included all content words (Nouns, Verbs, Adjs), and excluded proper nouns. (Thus, no function words.) The database has only 150,837 entries, so while it is not comprehensive of the entire English lexicon (which estimates about 200,000 words in common usage, 250,000 overall), it is fairly close. Note--it is Austrailian English, so some of the vowel pronunciations themselves may not be entirely accurate for SAE, but the overall C vs V should be.

LL Issue:	16.3420
Date Posted:	30-Nov-2005
Original Query:	Read original query
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