Menzerath-Altmann Law and Prothetic /v/ in Spoken Czech

Abstract

This paper discusses the Menzerath-Altmann law in general at first, then it is shown that the law is valid in spoken Czech. In particular, the relation between word length (measured in the number of syllables) and the mean syllable length (measured in the number of phonemes) is investigated. In addition, we model the relation between the relative occurrence of prothetic /v/ in words and word stems which, according to the official norms of the Czech language, begin with phoneme /o/, and word length in syllables in these words.