  We study rank-frequency relations for phonemes, the minimal units that still
relate to linguistic meaning. We show that these relations can be described by
the Dirichlet distribution, a direct analogue of the ideal-gas model in
statistical mechanics. This description allows us to demonstrate that the
rank-frequency relations for phonemes of a text do depend on its author. The
author-dependency effect is not caused by the author's vocabulary (common words
used in different texts), and is confirmed by several alternative means. This
suggests that it can be directly related to phonemes. These features contrast
to rank-frequency relations for words, which are both author and text
independent and are governed by the Zipf's law.
