Repetition of words

[nablator]

I *suspect* that Chinese languages have more distinct syllables than European languages, because of tones.

All 4 or 5 tones (there is a neutral tone in Mandarin, not in Cantonese) don't exist for each syllable, so it's less than ~400*5.

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Yoon Mi Oh's 2015 thesis (pages 44-45) provides estimates of the number of syllables for various languages, gathered by taking the 20,000 most frequent words in a corpus of each language and counting the different syllables that show up. Ordering them by increasing number of syllables:

Japanese: 643
Korean: 1104
Mandarin: 1274
Cantonese: 1298
Basque: 2082
Thai: 2438
Italian: 2729
Spanish: 2778
French: 2949
Turkish: 3260
Catalan: 3600
Serbian: 3831
Finnish: 3844
Hungarian: 4325
German: 5100
Vietnamese: 5156
English: 6949

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