The study examines the pronunciation of Czech /I/ and /i / in the speech of Czech Radio newsreaders. This vocalic contrast has been traditionally described as consisting in duration. The analyses reveal that the duration of the phonologically long /i / is only approximately 30% greater than that of the phonologically short /I /. As for the analysis of formant values, the short /I / appears to lie closer to vowels of the /e/-quality than to its long counterpart /i /. The morphological status of the syllables with /I/ and /i /, as well as the position within an utterance have been taken into account. The results also indicate interesting idiosyncratic tendencies.
From ancient times French, Spanish, Romanian and Russian have been in contact. Interferences between these languages can easily be observed today. These interferences are mainly in the phonetics of these languages, especially at the qualitative and quantitative levels of the vowels. This aspect allows the researchers to include all these languages among the Indo-European languages.
The paper presents a project of an acoustic data base of Mazovian dialects, and shows how modern research methods of acoustic phonetics can be employed in dialectological practice. The projected data base is going to contain objective data, independent of the researcher’s hearing, in the form of target values of the rst two formants for both stressed and unstressed oral vowels in various consonant contexts. The base is going to contain about 60000 realizations. It is also going to be supplied with rich metadata, such as dialect, subdialect, place of birth of the speakers, their age, gender and education, the date and source of the recording. The base is going to be accessed through a search engine capable of executing complex queries, and it is going to contain a library of graphs and statistical data illustrating the informants’ pronunciation. These data will allow for automated comparisons to be performed between the dialectal and the general Polish realizations of vowels, thus revealing the contemporary state of the vocalism of Mazovian dialects, and making it possible to verify the previous ndings.
The paper presents the results of the language analysis of the (Early) New High German village charters from the 17th and 18th centuries which come from: Archiwum Komisji Prawniczej, Volume XI, (Warszawa/Kraków/Łódź/Poznań/Wilno/Zakopane, 1938) and Targowski (2013). The scriveners are unknown. The center of attention are the ways of marking of the long and short vowels, which came into being owing to the lengthening and shortening of the vowels in the Early New High German time. The aim of the article is to determine to what extent the script fixes the features of the spoken language. The author introduces the results of his analysis, illustrating the characteristic features with appropriate examples.
The paper concentrates on formation of L2 English vowel categories in the speech of Polish learners. More specifically, it compares distribution of two English categories - /I/ and /e/ relative to neighbouring Polish vowels. 43 participants recorded Polish and English vowels in a /bVt/ context. First two formants were measured at a vowel midpoint and plotted on a vowel plane. The results reveal that while a separate /I/ category is formed fairly effectively in Polish learners pronunciation of English, a category of /e/ is almost completely subsumed by a Polish vowel /ϵ/
The paper concentrates on formation of L2 English vowel categories in the speech of Polish learners. More specifically, it compares distribution of two English categories - /I/ and /e/ relative to neighbouring Polish vowels. 43 participants recorded Polish and English vowels in a /bVt/ context. First two formants were measured at a vowel midpoint and plotted on a vowel plane. The results reveal that while a separate /I/ category is formed fairly effectively in Polish learners pronunciation of English, a category of /e/ is almost completely subsumed by a Polish vowel /ϵ/
The first part of the paper proposes a method of studying (or, more precisely, of recognizing) oral vowels, using the so-called relative formant frequencies. First, we describe the traditional method of acoustic study of oral vowels, together with its limitations. Next, we introduce the assumptions of the proposed method where, unlike in the traditional approach, a set of mixed models is used. The comparison, instead of being reduced to establishing whether two sets of vowels match, requires a distance to be calculated between each vowel and each model. The paper introduces the notion of relative formant frequency (denoted f') which was used in the comparisons to minimize the impact of individual articulatory variation on the outcome of the analysis. It was de!ned as the proportion between, on the one hand, the difference between the absolute frequency of the given formant, and its minimal value observed in actual pronunciations, and on the other hand, the difference between the minimal and the maximal frequency of the formant, as observed in pronunciations. In order to establish the f' of model vowels, we used the cardinal vowels pronounced by several British phoneticians (including Daniel Jones).
The second part of the paper consists of a list of relative formant frequencies of model vowels (the method of calculation was discussed in the first part). In this part, a test of the proposed method is designed using several new devices, such as the articulatory difference between vowels (expressed both as an integer and as a percentage), and the percentage distance between the analysed vowels and the particular model. In addition, a few simple statistics such as median, mode and arithmetic mean are used. The test itself consists of recognizing new vowels as pronounced by three different phoneticians. The calculations lead to the conclusion that recognition of vowels carried out with the use of the proposed method produces very accurate results which, most importantly, do not deviate in most instances from the expected values (the difference between the recognized vowel and the vowel described by the speaker did not exceed 40%). In conclusion, this part of the paper describes the advantages and limitations of the proposed method, and suggests possible solutions which may help improve the results in the future.
This article offers a systematic and comprehensive account of vowel changes that take place in the inadmissible phonological sequence /VV/ within a word in Zulu. Instead of discussing vowel changes in terms of vowel coalescence, vowel elision and glide insertion (as is conventionally done) this approach discusses the vowel changes with regard to the position of the two juxtaposed vowel phonemes on the vowel chart. The resultant form is predictable in terms of five basic combinatory possibilities, namely that the first vowel is a higher vowel than the second; the first vowel is a lower vowel than the second; the first vowel is a front vowel while the second is a back vowel; the first vowel is a back vowel while the second is a front vowel or the two vowels in the inadmissible sequence /VV/ are identical vowels. This article furthermore demonstrates that palatalisation is triggered by a semi-vowel generated by the inadmissible phonological structure /VV/ in the case of diminutives and locatives derived from nouns containing a bilabial or alveolar consonant in the final syllable.
Samogłoski artykulacyjnie niesamodzielne o położeniu języka zmienionym w stosunku do samogłosek podstawowych – głównie pod wpływem sąsiedztwa głosek miękkich, ale także niektórych półsamogłosek/glajdów – oznacza się w ramach alfabetu slawistycznego za pomocą jednej lub dwóch kropek. Ta podwójna konwencja nie jest jednak w polskiej fonetyce należycie objaśniana (pewien wyjątek stanowi praca Madelskiej i Witaszek Samborskiej 1998). Również w pracach, w których – w ramach API – nie stosuje się kropkowych diakrytów, niejasno przedstawiane są relacje między typami przesunięć artykulacyjnych polskich samogłosek: podwyższeniem, uprzednieniem i centralizacją. Tymczasem jedna kropka powinna być tłumaczona jako podwyższenie artykulacji przy braku uprzednienia ([ė], [ȯ]), dwie kropki – jako jej uprzednienie (z podwyższeniem jako cechą obojętną: [ä] oraz [ö] są podwyższone, [ü] – nie). Jeżeli uwzględniamy również cofniętą samogłoskę [ë], wówczas dwie kropki muszą być ujmowane szerzej – jako centralizacja (uprzednienie lub cofnięcie).
EN
The vowels articulatively dependent on the tongue root position changed in relation to the basic vowels – mainly due to the nearness to soft speech sounds, but also some semivowels/glides – are marked in the Slavic phonetic alphabet with one or two dots. This double convention is not adequately explained in the Polish phonetics (a certain exception is the work of Madelska and Witaszek-Samborska, 1998). Also in the works in which – as part of the API [the International Phonetic Alphabet] – dot-shaped diacritics are not used, relations between types of articulation shifts of Polish vowels: vowel increasing, vowel breaking and vowel reduction are unclear. Meanwhile, one dot should be translated as an increase in articulation in the absence of vowel breaking ([ė], [ȯ]), two dots – as its vowel breaking (with an increase as an indifferent attribute: [ä] and [ö] are vowel breaking, [ü] – no). If we also include the retracted vowel [ë], then the two dots must be recognized more broadly – as vowel reduction (vowel breaking or retraction).
The paper presents a comparative analysis of the assimilation in terms of voicing on the border between words in Macedonian and in Romanian. Although the compared languages belong to different language families, the pronunciation of the obstruental segments in this position is similar. In both Romanian andMacedonian, a regular regressive assimilation is observed on the border between two words. In Macedonian, the voiced obstruent at the end of a word can be pronounced as a voiced or a voiceless before a resonant at the beginning of the next word. It is important that more often the voiced obstruent at the end of the word loses voicing before a vowel in the initial position than before a sonant. In Romanian, before a resonant in the initial position, the voiced obstruent in the final position of the word in front of it is pronounced voiced. The voiceless obstruent on the border between words can be pronounced as a voiced if it occurs before a sonant in the initial position of the next word. This is an optional phenomenon like the voiceless pronunciation of the voiced obstruent before a resonant on the border of two words in Macedonian. As one can see, in both languages, obstruents at the end of a word behave differently before initial vowels and sonants on the inter-word border.
The article shows the possibilities of using the Pillai test in research on vowels, using the example of the stressed vowel [a] in the speech of Polish women using the dialectal variety of the Southern Borderland Polish, and deported in 1936 from Soviet Ukraine to northern Kazakhstan.
PL
W artykule przedstawiono możliwości zastosowania testu Pillaia w badaniach nad samogłoskami na przykładzie akcentowanej samogłoski [a] występującej w mowie Polek posługujących się gwarową odmianą polszczyzny południowokresowej, deportowanych w 1936 r. z Ukrainy radzieckiej do północnego Kazachstanu.
“Slonecznik” by Jeremiasz Drexelius was published in 1630. It was the first book printed in Pawel Konrad’s local printing house. In the composition of the text, there have been used three kinds of printed writing: schwabacher, italics and antique. The article presents ways of writing vowels in the excerpts of text that were composed with those types of writing. The excerpts provide documentation for variance and prescriptiveness in orthography of the time.
PL
W 1630 roku został opublikowany w Lublinie Słonecznik Jeremiasza Drexeliusa. Był on pierwszą książką wydaną przez miejscową oficynę wydawniczą, należącą wówczas do Pawła Konrada. Do składu tego tekstu zostały użyte trzy rodzaje pism drukowanych: szwabacha, kursywa i antykwa. Artykuł przedstawia sposoby zapisu samogłosek we fragmentach tekstu złożonych tymi pismami, które dokumentują wariantywność i normalizację ówczesnej ortografii.
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