Universal 916:
- Original
- As the number of contrastive segments in a language increases, the average length of a word will decrease.
- Standardized
- The more numerous the contrastive segments, the shorter the average length of a word.
- Keywords
- word length, phoneme inventory
- Domain
- phonology, morphology
- Type
- mutual implication
- Status
- diachronic
- Quality
- statistical
- Basis
- sample of 10 languages in Nettle 1995
- Source
- Nettle 1995: 359
- Counterexamples
1. Some such correlation between size of phoneme inventory and word or morpheme length has frequently been suggested before; see Plank 1998: 200-201 for references (Hockett, Saporta, Milewski, Hagège & Haudricourt, Décsy, Dressler; add Skalicka 1979 [1958]: 239: “Enthält eine Sprache wenig Vokale und zugleich wenig Konsonanten (wie die polynesischen Sprachen), wird dieser Mangel durch lange Wörter kompensiert.”). See #656 for morpheme length. 2. See #659 for a related suggestion that the likelihood of homophony will decrease with inventory size, given the same word length average.3. As suggested by Roman Jakobson (or also by Skalicka 1979 [1964]: 308), an alternative to morpheme/word length of compensating for small phoneme inventories would be to be more liberal about phonotactics.