In the Beginning was Information

and other sounds are thus not learnt. The child diminishes the range ofsounds, until, eventually, the frequency distribution typical of his mothertongue is obtained.Among languages, the number of sounds employed, varies between 15and 85. The Rotokas language spoken on Bougainville Island, NewGuinea, has the shortest alphabet, namely only 11 letters, six consonantsand five vowels: a, b, e, g, i, k, o, p, r, t, and u. Having said this, we stilldo not know how many different sounds can be produced with these letters.On the other hand, the Nepalese language employs more than 60 letters,while 72 letters including obsolete ones, are used in Kampuchean.The largest number of vowels, 55, is found in Sedang, a language used incentral Vietnam; this includes the various pitches at which “similar” vowelsare voiced. At the other extreme, the Caucasian language Abkhazian,has only two vowels. Another Caucasian language, Ubyxian, employs thegreatest number of consonants, between 80 and 85, while the above-mentionedRotokas uses only six, the smallest known number.The sounds which serve as acoustic elements of a language, are known inlinguistics as phonemes. In German most phonemes are represented bysingle letters, but often two or three letters are required (e. g. ei, eu, andsch). With only a few exceptions, phonemes are meaningless sounds –they carry no meaning. The most concise meaningful units are the morphemes,which are the simplest structures at the lowest linguistic level. Atthe top of the lingual hierarchy is the most complex level, namely theentire text. Being the smallest functional language unit, a morpheme comprisesone or more phonemes, e. g. simple words without prefixes and suffixes.A morpheme is itself part of a lexeme or word, or identical to one.Lexemes are the basic units of the vocabulary of a language in conventionalform (e. g. singular nouns or the infinitive form of a verb). Butmany words appearing in a text are usually inflected forms of the lexicalunit. There are very many possible ways of word formation, but all languagesemploy only a fraction of this total. The greatest number of differentsound combinations would be attained when all sounds or phonemescould be combined with all others in every possible sequence. Sequenceslike ktx, nxr, or bfg appear to be possible, but do not occur in English orGerman. The allocation of the meanings of sound combinations (words)are arbitrary and must be learned through experience. But the combinationof words to form sentences, is a different matter:It is very remarkable that, although we do not know the meaning of aword which we have not yet heard, we can understand sentences that havenever before been voiced, and we can produce an infinite number of newsentences which can immediately be understood by the members of ourlanguage group.207