Sound dissonance in triliteral roots and its correlation with the distance between their places of articulation - Linguistic and statistical study

Abstract

There are two common hypotheses explaining the phenomenon of sound dissonance in Arabic word structures.

 The first is about the convergence of places of articulation and the second is about their divergence. According to these two hypotheses, sounds tend to be inconsistent within words and difficult to pronounce, if their places of articulation are very close or very far apart.

Some researchers have tried to study the issue from a statistical point of view, but the used methods have some shortcomings, which does not allow to reach a complete and precise understanding of this issue.

In addition, the results of some studies seemed contradictory, which requires a new scientific contribution to resolve the controversy over the explanation of this phenomenon.

Since both hypotheses are two aspects of the same factor, which is the distance between places of articulation, the present study sought to explore the statistical relationship between the sequence of sounds in lexical roots on the one hand, and the distance between their places of articulation on the other hand, using a statistical linguistic approach.

The results were almost decisive in favor of the convergence hypothesis rather than the divergence hypothesis.