Häufigkeiten von Buchstaben / Graphemen / Phonemen: Konvergenzen des Rangierungsverhaltens

The present study raises the question in how far low-level linguistic units, such as letters, graphemes, sounds and phonemes, follow one and the same pattern as to their frequency distribution. Based on Altmann/Lehfeldt’s (1980) study on 63 samples from 38 different languages, a separate reanalysis of the letter/grapheme vs. sound/phoneme samples is made, concentrating on the empirical entropy and repeat rate, on the one hand, and their theoretical calculations derived from the geometric and Zipf-Mandelbrot distributions. As a result, there are no significant differences as to these two global measures. This finding is interpreted in terms of a strong argument in favor of an analogical behavior of these linguistic units.