Phonetics of Ejectives

Emphasis (contrastive pharyngealization of coronals) in Arabic spreads from an emphatic consonant to neighboring segments. Previous research suggests that in addition to changing spectral characteristics of adjacent segments, emphasis might affect voice onset time (VOT) of voiceless stops because emphatic stops in Arabic dialects have considerably shorter VOT than their plain cognates. No study investigated whether emphatic coarticulation could shorten VOT in plain stops produced in emphatic environment. The present study investigates changes in VOT in syllable-initial /t/ using production data from sixteen speakers of Qatari Arabic, who read non-word syllables with initial plain and emphatic stops /t/ and /t. / adjacent to another plain or emphatic consonant. The results show that emphasis spread is a gradient process that affects only spectral characteristics of segments, causing changes in vowel formants and spectral centre of gravity of stops. Long-lag VOT in plain /t/, however, was not shortened in emphatic syllables. The findings suggest that shorter VOT in voiceless emphatic stops in Qatari Arabic is not a mechanical aftermath of pharyngealization but, rather, a phonological requirement to maintain contrast between long-lag and short-lag VOT in plain and emphatic stops.

Arabic has a vowel system with three long and three short monophthongs. One of the parameters that accounts for qualitative differences between long and short vowels across languages is tenseness/laxness of vowels located on the peripheral/non-peripheral tracks in the vowel space. The present study investigates acoustical cues (F1, F2, and duration) of vowels using the data obtained from 21 speakers of Qatari Arabic. The vowels were produced in four phonetic contexts: labial, alveolar, uvular, and pharyngeal. The results revealed considerable qualitative differences between long and short vowels. The long vowels were articulated at the periphery of vowel space; the short vowels occupied more centralized positions. The co-articulatory effect of the preceding consonant was more prominent in short vowels. Short high vowels /i u/ were lowered toward the mid position; short low /a/ was fronted; long low /a˘/ was retracted and raised. The findings suggest that short vowels in Qatari Arabic are lax and non-peripheral.

Voice onset time in the Emirati Arabic dialect mutasim al-Deaibes a , rami alsharefeen b , ghaleb rabab'ah c,e , Bassil mashaqba d and sharif alghazo c,e a Yarmouk university, irbid, Jordan; b rabdan Academy, Abu Dhabi, united Arab emirates; c sharjah university, sharjah, united Arab emirates;

The study employed a multifaceted, descriptive-analytic methodology to explore the variations in the articulation of the vowel /a/ across five unique regional Arabic dialects within Saudi Arabia. The examination scrutinizes an established corpus of pre-recorded audio data, selectively curated from various speakers and systematically extracted from a recognized YouTube repository. The core inquiry probes the nuances and degrees of alterations in vowel quality pervasive among these specific Saudi dialects. Attention was directed towards the vowel /a/, evaluating its phonetic behavior in initial, medial, and final positions within the contextual framework. The conclusions drawn uncover pronounced disparities in the manifestation of the vowel /a/ among the regional dialects, delineating marked contrasts between short and long variations in some dialects, and an absence of such demarcation in others. These findings not only enrich the existing body of knowledge concerning the phonological portrayal of Arabic vowels but also accentuate the inherent complexity of vowel articulation within the multifaceted Arabic-speaking milieu. Consequently, this study broadens the academic comprehension of Arabic phonetics and holds consequential bearings on facets such as pedagogy, linguistic policy formulation, and avenues for continued scholarly exploration.

Note sur les sourdes douces en alsacien de Mulhouse Résumé.-Il est généralement admis que les consonnes aspirées s'opposent comme des 'fortes' aux sourdes douces considérées comme 'faibles'. Quelques arguments mènent cependant à la position inverse et permettent de comprendre divers détails des phonologies concernées, à commencer par celle du parler de Mulhouse.

Why there is no backness The case for dismissing both [coronal] and [dorsal] 1 A large body of evidence has led many scholars to assume that "the consonants surfacing as (anterior) coronals lack an articulator in underlying representations and acquire one at the surface by means of redundancy rules" (

This study investigates and documents the acoustic-phonetic characteristics of implosives and their allophonic-voiced plosives in Mpiemo (A86c), a Bantu language spoken in the Central African Republic. In Mpiemo, allophonic plosives are found before super-high vowels in the stem-initial and post-nasal positions. The present study shows an increasing versus decreasing voicing amplitude and positive versus negative fundamental frequency (F0) as typical acoustic properties for implosives and plosives. However, both implosives and plosives have a voicing amplitude that does not show an apparent change. In utterance medial intervocalic and non-focal positions, the F0 pattern is better associated with implosives and plosives than with voicing amplitude. In the utterance-initial position, some tokens of F0 show the influence of upcoming tone and intonation.

Most, if not all, dialects of the Arabic language are characterized by features of pharyngealization – traditionally called emphasis. This phenomenon has triggered a great amount of research as early as the eighth century AD. Classical Arab linguists have described emphasis in terms ...

The paper investigates the laryngeal specification of obstruents in Jazani Arabic and whether fundamental frequency (f 0) interacts with consonant voicing. It presents an acoustic analysis of voice onset time (VOT) and f 0 perturbations. It is hypothesized that f 0 perturbations should be predictable from the patterning of VOT in that voicing lead should induce a lowering effect on f 0 and long lag should induce an increasing effect on f 0. Twenty Jazani adult speakers produced target words with voiced and voiceless stops in controlled carrier sentences. VOT and f 0 estimates were measured, the latter dynamically from the midpoint of the closure to the midpoint of the vowel at 10 ms intervals. The results show that VOT patterns in Arabic signal two distinct laryngeal specifications and that f 0 perturbations appear to be predictable from the patterning of VOT. The results are then discussed in light of Laryngeal Realism and how they inform phonological representation.

A field-based ultrasound and acoustic study of Iwaidja, an endangered Australian Aboriginal language, investigates the phonetic identity of nonnasal velar consonants in intervocalic position, where past work has proposed a [+continuant] vs. [−continuant] phonemic contrast. We analyze
the putative contrast within a continuous phonetic space, defined by both acoustic and articulatory parameters, and find gradient variation: from more consonantal realizations, such as [ɰ], to more vocalic realizations, such as [a]. The distribution of realizations across lexical items and speakers does not support the proposed phonemic contrast. This case illustrates how lenition that is both phonetically gradient and variable across speakers and words can give the illusion of a contextually
restricted phonemic contrast.

This study investigates the conditioning effects of neighbouring consonants on the realisation of the phonemes /k/ and /dZ/ in Emirati Arabic (EA), which are optionally realised as [tS] and [j], respectively. Based on previous accounts of EA and other Gulf Arabic (GA) dialects, we set out to test the prediction that proximity of other, phonetically similar coronal (COR) obstruents [COR, −son, −cont] and coronal postalveolar fricatives [COR, −ant] inhibit the surface realisation of the affricate variants of these phonemes. We examine elicitation data from twenty young female native speakers of EA, using stimuli with the target segment in the presence of a similar neighbour, as compared to words with the neighbour at a longer distance or with another coronal consonant. The results point to an asymmetry in the behaviour of the voiced and voiceless targets, such that the predicted inhibitory effect is confirmed for the voiced, but not the voiceless target. We argue that this finding, coupled with a consideration of the intra-participant and lexical trends in the data, is compatible with an approach that treats the two processes as being at different stages of development, where the [k∼tS] alternation is a completed phonemic change, while the [dZ∼j] alternation is a synchronic phonological process.

This paper examines and accounts for the origin and presence of ejectives in Central Cushitic (CC) languages. Appleyard (2006) claimed that most occurrences of ejectives are due to borrowing from the Ethiosemitic languages. This is certainly true for all ejectives in Kemantney, and some in Blin and Xamtanga. However, examination of Appleyard's data shows that only 37% of ejectives in Blin and 25% of ejectives in Xamtanga are found in borrowings. Most ejectives in CC in these two languages are therefore "of indubitable Agaw origin", which suggests that ejectives are from the proto-language rather than through sound change. This paper analyzes the distribution of ejectives in Appleyard's data and reexamines the consequences for reconstructed forms and probable sound changes.

Refugee crisis or massive forced population movements are conflict driven displacements often from rural to urban areas. In 2017, around 65.6 million people were displaced due to conflicts, according to a report by the United Nations Development Program. The history of the Middle East North Africa region (MENA), in particular, has been shaped by episodes of forced migration in the post-World War II era. The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the subsequent war in 1948 created one of the longest-lasting refugee wave. More than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced to refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria and were then forced to displace again due to the 1967 June war. Many families who migrated to Lebanon and Kuwait had to evacuate their homes again, due to the Lebanese Civil War from 1975-1991, and later the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait which led to the Kuwait War from 1990-1992. Thus, Palestinian refugees have undergone several waves of forced displacement due to war, politica...

The Jewish community of ʕĀna, a city in western Iraq close to the Syrian border, was one of the oldest in the Jewish world. The community spoke its own distinct dialect, which was different from the one spoken by the Muslims in the city, on the one hand, and from the one spoken by the Jews in Baghdad, on the other hand. Due to its geographical location, it was previously hypothesized that the Jewish Arabic dialect of ʕĀna affiliates to the Euphrates branch of the Mesopotamian qǝltu dialects. This hypothesis is confirmed in this paper by examining the main traits of the dialect.

This paper presents a new analysis of a pattern of vowel copy in Iraqw verbal derivation. The main claim is that velar stops, which have previously been analyzed as transparent, are in fact opaque. The resulting pattern is cross-linguistically less marked, since the class of transpalent consonants is now restricted to gutturals, i.e. laryngeals, phan¡ngeals, uvulars, and a series of back fricatives, whose realization is post-velar rather than velar. KeywordS: Vowel copy, transpatent consonants, gutturals, velars, rounding, cornef vowels, Search and CoPy, Iraqw t lntroduction Vowel copy (sometimes called vowel echo) is a process in which a vowel undergoes total assimilation to another vowel in an adiacent syllable. In this paper we examine a case of vowel copy in Iraqq a Cushitic language of Tanzania. The target of the copying process is a vowel which occufs in verbal derivations, where

This paper presents new evidence in support of the view that front vowels and coronal consonants are members of the natural class of coronal sounds. Evidence is drawn from coronal consonant/front vowel parallels in Maltese where these segments pattern together in default assignment, in vowel-to-coronal consonant assimilation, and in the more general process of coronal assimilation. The significance of the present study goes beyond the support that it offers for the coronality of front vowels; it also bears directly on the representation of consonant/vowel interaction in nonlinear phonology. Further, the evidence from consonant/vowel parallels as default segments is of particular interest in light of proposals suggesting that [coronal] is the unmarked place of articulation for consonants. In this work, it is proposed that the unmarked status of [coronal] can be extended naturally to include not only consonants but vowels as well.

This article addresses the descriptive and theoretical aspects of the relation between the cavity properties of vowels and consonants. This relation is studied on the basis of some vocalic harmonizing processes depending on the adjacency between [u] and a velar (or labial) consonant in the domain of the stressed nucleus. Propagation of /u/ and preservation of /u/ in pre-tonic position in Southern Italian varieties provide the crucial testing ground for our analysis; one last process we investigate is the distribution of the metaphonic outcomes in a Salento dialect. The nature of phonological representations is the other question we are concerned with. This point has been recently explored specifically in relation to the explanatory role of the structure and its relation with the melodic content of segments. Our proposal is that the phonological structure of the string corresponds in a direct and exhaustive way to the elementary melodic properties of the segments.

Notes on the Arabic Text This book is primarily a legal study, designed to portray Bedouin law as a means for providing security in the desert in the absence of governmental or tribal authority. It is not a study in linguistics. Nevertheless, as it presents proverbs and other materials in the Bedouin dialects of Sinai and the Negev, it should be of use to linguists and students of the Arabic language if the following comments are taken into account and reference is made to my book A Culture of Desert Survival: Bedouin Proverbs from Sinai and the Negev, its transliterations, and its glossary of Bedouin words and meanings.

Implosive consonants in Bantu A80 languages are widely attested in the literature. The status that specific authors assign to them, however, differ significantly, ranging from mere phonetic contrasts to phonemic status or even absence in certain languages. Given this variety of language analyses, along with a controversy about necessary and sufficient features of implosive sounds, this paper aims at reassessing the range of implosives and non-implosives within A80 and especially Gyeli (A801). I show that though implosives are expected in Gyeli from previous literature, these sounds are better described as pre-glottalized stops with a relatively long prevoicing time. That raises the question whether this analysis might be more appropriate for other A80 languages as well. While this paper cannot provide any conclusive answer on the latter question, it hopes to raise awareness of the methodological problems associated with the present description of A80 implosives, encouraging a system...

Like distinctive features, elements identify natural classes and model the structure of segments. But unlike features, they combine asymmetrically in expressions, with head-dependent relations between elements making a significant contribution to the expressive power of representations. Most versions of Element Theory follow the general principle that a structural domain-such as a segmental expression-can have just one head element. In Backley (2011), however, element structures are permitted to have two heads. Multiple headedness is a consequence of allowing dual interpretation, where each element has two different phonetic realisations depending on its head or non-head status. While dual interpretation is better equipped to capture natural classes and explain phonological processes, its by-product is the need for double-headed expressions, which present a challenge to element-based theory. It is proposed that the six elements (|I|, |U|, |A|, |H|, |L|, |ʔ|) naturally form three pairs of opposing (dark vs light) values, each pair being associated with one of three fundamentals of spoken language: colour, resonance, frequency. It is then argued that headedness relations refer separately to each fundamental property. So, if there are three fundamentals in a melodic structure, then there is the potential for up to three heads in any one expression. The implications of this approach are considered with regard to segmental markedness and language typology.

This dissertation investigates the place of articulation of allegedly 'placeless' consonants of Japanese-the moraic nasal /N/ and the glottal fricative /h/. In the discipline of phonology, these two consonants have typically been analyzed as having no place features of their own, on the grounds that their place features are predictable from the adjacent segments, that they often appear as outputs of debuccalization, and that they show high articulatory variability. While some researchers believe that certain segments are placeless both phonologically and phonetically, it has not been examined how these Japanese consonants appear in the surface phonetics. The current research instrumentally tests the hypothesis that they have articulatory targets, based on qualitative and quantitative examination of data produced by native speakers of Japanese. Such a study is important in order to fill the scientific gap between the phonological theories and phonetic approaches to the study of sounds. Ultrasound experiments were conducted on six native speakers of Tokyo Japanese, and the tongue movement was analyzed. The tracing of the overall tongue configurations on the ultrasound imaging was done by EdgeTrak (Stone 2005). The data for placeless segments were compared to those for the adjacent vowels, in terms of tongue shape, constriction degree and constriction location. The results involve three significant points: First, /N/ shows a significant dorsum raising for all speakers, while /h/ shows a pharyngeal constriction for 5 out of 6 speakers. Second, the constriction location is different across speakers: The location of /N/ ranges from post-alveolar to uvular, and the location of /h/ is either uvular or pharyngeal. Third, /N/ and /h/ had no more variability than /k/, which is widely assumed to be a velar-specified segment. This research empirically confirms that these two segments are articulatorily stable within a speaker but variable across speakers. This contradicts long-standing views about the segments in question. The individual variability may also lend support for the phonologization of different phonetic interpretations. Finally, the place-features of these same segments could be different across languages, and further instrumental studies of these sounds are encouraged.

This dissertation investigates the place of articulation of allegedly 'placeless' consonants of Japanese-the moraic nasal /N/ and the glottal fricative /h/. In the discipline of phonology, these two consonants have typically been analyzed as having no place features of their own, on the grounds that their place features are predictable from the adjacent segments, that they often appear as outputs of debuccalization, and that they show high articulatory variability. While some researchers believe that certain segments are placeless both phonologically and phonetically, it has not been examined how these Japanese consonants appear in the surface phonetics. The current research instrumentally tests the hypothesis that they have articulatory targets, based on qualitative and quantitative examination of data produced by native speakers of Japanese. Such a study is important in order to fill the scientific gap between the phonological theories and phonetic approaches to the study of sounds. Ultrasound experiments were conducted on six native speakers of Tokyo Japanese, and the tongue movement was analyzed. The tracing of the overall tongue configurations on the ultrasound imaging was done by EdgeTrak (Stone 2005). The data for placeless segments were compared to those for the adjacent vowels, in terms of tongue shape, constriction degree and constriction location. The results involve three significant points: First, /N/ shows a significant dorsum raising for all speakers, while /h/ shows a pharyngeal constriction for 5 out of 6 speakers. Second, the constriction location is different across speakers: The location of /N/ ranges from post-alveolar to uvular, and the location of /h/ is either uvular or pharyngeal. Third, /N/ and /h/ had no more variability than /k/, which is widely assumed to be a velar-specified segment. This research empirically confirms that these two segments are articulatorily stable within a speaker but variable across speakers. This contradicts long-standing views about the segments in question. The individual variability may also lend support for the phonologization of different phonetic interpretations. Finally, the place-features of these same segments could be different across languages, and further instrumental studies of these sounds are encouraged.

This study investigates nasalisation and laryngealisation in the production of pharyngeal consonants in Iraqi Arabic (IA) and as potential voice quality (VQ) settings of IA speakers in general. Pharyngeal consonants have been the subject of investigation in many studies on Arabic, primarily due to the wide range of variation in their realisation across dialects, including approximant, fricative, and stop variants. This is the first quantitative study of its kind to extend these findings to IA and to investigate whether any of the variants and/or VQ features are dialectspecific. The study offers a detailed auditory and acoustic account of the realisations of pharyngeal consonants as produced by nine male speakers of three Iraqi dialects: Baghdad (representing Central gelet), Basra (representing Southern gelet) and Mosul (representing Northern qeltu) (Blanc, 1964; Ingham, 1997). Acoustic cues of nasalisation and phonation types are investigated in isolated vowels, oral, nasal, and pharyngeal environments in order to unravel the source of the nasalised and laryngealised VQ percept and to establish whether their manifestations are categorical or particular to certain contexts. Results suggest a range of realisations for the pharyngeals that are conditioned by word position and dialect. Regardless of realisation, VQ measurements suggest that: 1-nasalisation increases when pharyngeals are adjacent to nasals, beyond what is expected of a nasal environment; 2vowels neighbouring pharyngeals show more nasalisation than in oral environments; 3-vowels in pharyngeal contexts and isolation show more laryngealisation compared with nasal and oral contexts; 4-both nasals and pharyngeals show progressive effect of nasalisation, and pharyngeals show a progressive effect of laryngealisation; 5-/ħ/ shows more nasalisation but less laryngealisation effect on neighbouring vowels than /ʕ/; and 6-Baghdad speech is the most nasalised and laryngealised and Basra speech the least. These results coincide with observations on Muslim Baghdadi gelet having a guttural quality (Bellem, 2007). The study reveals that the overall percept of a nasalised and laryngealised VQ in IA is a local feature rather than a general vocal setting.

This study explored the consistency of locus equation slopes to serve as phonetic descriptors of stop place in CV utterances across voiced versus voiceless aspirated stops. Using traditional locus equation measurement sites for F2 onsets, voiceless labial and coronal stops had lower locus equation slopes relative to their voiced counterparts, whereas velars failed to show voicing differences. When locus equations were derived using F2 onsets for voiced stops that were measured closer to the stop release burst, comparable to the protocol for measuring voiceless aspirated stops, the slope differences across voicing were greatly minimized. This methodological factor, rather than an underlying phonetic-based explanation, provides a reasonable account for the observed flatter locus equation slopes of voiceless labial and coronal stops relative to voiced cognates.

The aim of the present experiment was to investigate the acoustic phonetic cues that could underlie a post-stress voicing distinction which, when considered on a segmental basis, appears to be neutralised. The data concern the difference in German between minimal pairs such as 'Enten' and 'enden' which in more casual speaking styles appear to show schwa and oral stop deletion and a surface realisation as a neutralised creaky voice nasal. We extracted from the Kiel Corpus all such contrasts that were judged by trained transcribers to have been neutralised in this way. We measured the spectral slope over the first two harmonics and the time at which the spectral slope first changed significantly. Our results show that, contrary to segmentallybased assumptions, /t, d/ were distinguished depending on the onset time of creaky voice relative to the preceding vowel. These data are consistent with a model in which cues to segmental contrasts may be distributed non-segmentally in time.

Ori Shachmon's 2022 monograph Tēmōnit: The Jewish Varieties of Yemeni Arabic is a rich documentation of the dialects of over sixty Jewish Yemeni locales. The book is based on the author's more than two decades of fieldwork in Yemeni Jewish communities residing in Israel. The book is divided into two main parts. The first part consists of an introductory foreword and four chapters, each of which situates the Jewish communities and their dialects in their social and linguistic contexts. The second part of the book, comprising around two thirds of its length, consists of Chapter 5, which presents 40 texts from various (pre-emigration) locales across Yemen. Shachmon's work is an invaluable documentation of Yemeni Jewish dialects that will likely be lost within a generation or so (12). Below, I briefly outline the topics of each chapter before discussing what I consider the work's strengths and weaknesses. Shachmon begins her book with a foreword that narrates the evolution of the project, from her search for a dissertation topic to her introduction to the various communities and offers an overview of the localities in Yemen represented by the informants with whom she worked. It is clear here that Shachmon and her colleagues spent a great deal of time among these communities, which enriches discussion throughout the book, and is especially evident in the author's cultural and communal commentaries that bring the communities to life for the reader. Chapter 1 offers a brief overview of Jewish history in Yemen, describes the geographic distribution of Jewish communities in Yemen (§1.1), characterizes intercommunal relationships between Muslims and Jews in various places and times (§1.1), and offers a few anticipatory remarks about the typology of Jewish dialects in relation to the better-documented Muslim dialects of Yemen (§1.2 & §1.3). Chapter 2 introduces the communities in Israel, beginning with a discussion of the waves of immigration and settlement patterns therein. Much of the chapter is dedicated to addressing questions related to the reliability of interviewees' dialects as witnesses to pre-immigration Yemeni Jewish dialects (§2.4). Most Yemeni Jews rapidly adopted Hebrew as a spoken language once in Israel, and the author reports that those in the third and following generations have no linguistic competency in Arabic. For the book, Shachmon relies on interviewees from the first two generations, whom she characterizes as 'heritage speakers', meaning that they 'mastered Yemeni Arabic and Hebrew, yet the latter…has become their stronger language' (13). In order to compensate for the potential challenges that come with speakers for whom Hebrew is the dominant language, Shachmon conducted open-ended interviews focusing on first-hand experiences in order to elicit their 'dormant native speech' (13). For Shachmon, despite the rapid and, among the younger generations near-total shift to Hebrew, her interviewees are legitimate sources for understanding the traditional dialects of Yemeni Jews, in large part because of the many features their speech shares with Muslim dialects still spoken in Yemen. Chapter 3 describes some of the major differences between Jewish and Muslim dialects. Shachmon states that in most cases Jewish dialects are typologically similar to Muslim dialects from the same locations. The two primary categories of difference

Cette étude a pour but d'étudier la production du groupe allophonique /t ̪͡ ɾ/ à Santiago du Chili afin de donner les caractéristiques acoustiques des rhotiques. Pour cela, un protocole d'élicitation de parole (jeu de dénomination d'images) a été créé. Les paramètres prosodiques ne sont pas traités ici et le débit de parole n'a pas été contrôlé durant l'expérience. Les données montrent différentes réalisations du cluster (comme [t ə ɾ̞ ] [t ̪͡ ɹ ̝ ] ou [ɹ ̝ ]) ainsi que l'insertion d'un vocoïde central [ ə ] dans les réalisations non-affriquée et non-fricative. Cette insertion paraît empêcher les processus de coarticulation entre les consonnes coronales /t / et /ɾ/. De plus, nous pensons que ce vocoïde pourrait jouer un rôle dans la perception du cluster, en particulier de celle du tap apico-alvéolaire occlusif qui suit. Nos données montrent que les allophones [t ̪͡ ɹ ̝ ] et [ɹ ̝ ] ne sont pas motivés par des facteurs linguistiques mais plutôt par des facteurs sociolinguistiques comme l'âge ou le profil socio-économique.

Most, if not all, dialects of the Arabic language are characterized by features of pharyngealization – traditionally called emphasis. This phenomenon has triggered a great amount of research as early as the eighth century AD. Classical Arab linguists have described emphasis in terms ...

The phonemic inventory of Arabic includes a plainemphatic contrast in a number of coronal stops and fricatives. The emphatic members in these contrastive pairs are articulated with a secondary posterior constriction in the velopharyngeal region of the vocal tract. This secondary constriction is absent in the plain counterparts. The primary constriction is also believed to differ in the plainemphatic pairs. This study examines the differences in the primary articulation of the plain-emphatic voiceless alveolar fricatives /s/-/sʕ/ in Lebanese Arabic as reflected in the configuration of the tongue blade. Findings suggest that the tongue blade is lower during /sʕ/ than during /s/. There is also evidence for tongue blade concavity during /sʕ/, a configuration not assumed during /s/.

Arabic is spoken by more than 280 million people around the world and has been subject to attention in a number of acoustic phonetic studies. However, there are a limited number of studies on Gulf Arabic dialects and the majority of these studies have focused mainly on male speakers. Therefore, this study aimed to explore two Gulf Arabic dialects, the central Najdi dialect from Saudi Arabia and the Bahraini Bahraini dialect from Bahrain. It aimed to VII Author's Declaration I hereby acknowledge that the work contained in this thesis is my own original work and has not previously in its entirety or in part been submitted to any academic institution for degree purposes.

Resonant Root node o f a consonant Root node of a sonorant root node singular spread glottis someone sonorant The Sound Pattern o f English (Chomsky and Halle 1968) spread glottis spread glottis something stative transitive Vowel Voice Onset Time xvu CHAPTER 1 1.2. What Are Ejectives? Ejectives are speech sounds, typically a stop or affricate (and rarely a fricative), made with a glottalic egressive airstream mechanism. Ejectives are formed with roughly simultaneous closure of the vocal folds and a constriction in the oral cavity (which could be between the lips and the uvula). The larynx is then raised like a piston about one centimeter, compressing the air between the glottis and the oral constriction (Ladefoged 1982:120). Then the oral stricture is released, followed by the opening of the vocal folds. A 'popping sound' is created as the compressed air is released from the mouth. Because these sounds are quite rare in Europe, their description and production have caused linguists problems for hundreds of years. Take, for example, Ludolfs (1661) Grammatica AErhiopica , a grammar of Amharic, which, incidentally, according to Ullendorff (1955), was the first to introduce the apostrophe notation for ejective soundsk 'However, among all these the most notable and difficult in pronunciation are the following: k ', t', s ', z', p' which examples are not found in the whole of Europe. They closely resemble those letters, which on account of the difference we note in our syllabary by an apostrophe, but in so strong collision of articulators, and which are carried out in a reverberation of sound, that one can fully imitate them only slowly and with difficulty.' [Translation: PDR] 'Among topics discussed at that Congress were several papers on 'clicks'. I remember sitting beside George Trager, who was an excellent phonetician, and exchanging with him glances of disbelief. At least two of the speakers were quite clearly confusing ejectives with clicks and that stimulated me to write the short article On the Classification o f Stop Consonants that appeared in the Maître Phonétique in 1939.' 4 Many additional terms tor ejectives cloud the picture. They are often known as 'glottalized' consonants, a term which Catford (1977) objects to on phonetic grounds, since the suffix-ized implies secondary articulation, as in palatalized or velarized; he proposes the term glottallc. Trubetzkoy (1939/1969:217, fn 136) discusses various other names for ejectives in use at the time. I combine his list with other terms I have encountered: Abruptive (usually only in Russian; Bokarev and Lomtatidze 1967) Checked stop (along with other sounds; Jakobson, Fant, and Halle 1952) Consonant of supraglottal expiration (Jakovlev 1923) Consonant with glottal occlusion (cited in Trubetzkoy 1939[ 1969]) Evulsive (Rousselot 1897-1908) Glottalic pressure stops (Catford 1939) Glottalic egressive consonant (Ladefoged 1982) Glottalized consonant (Committee of American Anthropological Association 1916) Glottal stop sounds (Meinhof 1915) Glottocclusive / glottal occlusive (Trubetzkoy 1931a) Recursive (Trubetzkoy 1922, 1939 [1969:145-6]) Although ejectives were finally accurately described impressionistically in the 1920s, they were not thoroughly examined instrumentally or acoustically until the past twenty years. The earliest instrumental work which I am aware of comes from Rousselot (1897-1908), who provided kymographic, laryngographic, and palatographic figures of various Georgian ejectives. Selmer (1935) contains a few instrumental measures, again on Georgian sounds, including ejectives. Another pioneering effort, though dated today, is

The objective of this work is to investigate the linguistic structure of Iraqi Arabic or what is known as Mesopotamian Arabic. The paper presents an overview of some of the fundamental analyses of Iraqi Arabic-Mesopotamian Arabic. This article is concentrated on the most important parts of the language which are the phonological, morphological, and syntactical features. The paper not only examines the linguistic feature of Iraqi Arabic but it also, discusses how Iraqi Arabic dialect is different from Modern Standard Arabic with data that are not considered before and with certain new theoretical proposals. The researcher analysis the three dialects, which are Baghdadi, Southern, and Maslawi dialect and provides an important data for each dialect. Unlike Modern Standard Arabic, Iraqi Arabic went through many changes. Phonologically, Iraqi Arabic has more consonants than Modern Standard Arabic, and a few additional long vowels. Many sounds have been replaced with different sounds. In addition, the words in Iraqi Arabic does not end with vowels. Therefore, words end with consonants rather than vowels in Iraqi Arabic. Morphologically, Iraqi Arabic is different from Modern Standard Arabic in the present progressive tense. In Iraqi Arabic, the tenses are formed by adding a prefix to the conjugated stem of the verb, which cannot be found in Modern Standard Arabic. Syntactically, Iraqi Arabic differs from Modern Standard Arabic in two ways: first there is no case marking; Iraqi Arabic does not show overt cases as it is found in Modern Standard Arabic. Second, Iraqi Arabic lacks agreement. Iraqi Arabic does not always follow the structure of verb subject order as found in Modern Standard Arabic. The verb usually has full agreement with the subject in both orders, subject verb and verb subject. Finally, Iraqi Arabic has an interesting feature which is head movement that cannot be found in Modern Standard Arabic as Soltan argues. This is can be shown in the following example: [The student seems that ____ he read the book.] Among the other issues that the author discusses in this study are the history of Iraqi Arabic. In addition to the features of Iraqi Arabic and the effects of other languages, such as Turkish and Semitic languages on Iraqi dialects.

The research described in this paper addresses the dual concerns of synthesis of Arabic, a language that has shot to prominence in the past few years, and synthesis on a handheld device, realization of which presents difficult software engineering problems. Our system was developed in conjunction with the DARPA BABYLON project, and has been integrated with English synthesis, English and Arabic ASR, and machine translation on a single off-the-shelf PDA. We present a concatenative, general-domain Arabic synthesizer that runs 7 times faster than real time with a 9MB footprint. The voice itself was developed over only a few months, without access to costly prepared databases. It has been evaluated using standard test protocols with results comparable to those achieved by English voices of the same size with the same level of development.

Waima'a is a little known language spoken in East Timor. From a typological perspective, its stop system is unusual for an Austronesian language: it has a fourway stop system which includes a set of voiceless ejectives. In this paper, we report on the results of our first experimental investigation of Waima'a, in which ejectives and pulmonic voiceless aspirated and unaspirated stops are compared. After first presenting some qualitative observations about ejectives, we examine voice onset time (VOT) duration, closure duration and overall duration i.e. closure + VOT. We then turn to a cross-linguistic comparison, looking in particular at the behaviour of ejectives relative to other voiceless stop types, and at possible place of articulation dependencies concerning VOT and closure duration.

We examine some acoustic properties of ejective stops in Waima'a (an Austronesian language spoken in East Timor), and compare them with other voiceless stop types that occur in the language. Previous studies of ejectives in other languages have suggested that they may fall into two classes, strong and weak. We compare our Waima'a results with some existing findings in the literature, and suggest that while Waima'a ejectives might appear to be more appropriately characterized as strong on some criteria, they do not sit squarely in either category.

This paper presents results from an ongoing investigation into stop consonants in Waima'a, focusing on the issue of tense v. lax ejectives. Sources tend to describe ejectives in a given language as either tense or lax; however ejectives in Waima'a, do not fit squarely into either category [4]. Here we compare ejectives in word-initial and word-medial contexts, to specifically address the role of word-position in the tense/lax distinction. Results show that word-position affects the duration of all stop types analyzed, i.e. unaspirated, postaspirated, & ejective stops. Variability amongst the ejective tokens suggests that the notion of a tense/lax dichotomy should be replaced instead with that of a tense/lax continuum.

A selection of typologically unusual or possibly unique sounds in Changana are briefly described, including the unaspirated and aspirated versions of /tl/ and /p §/ as well as voiced and aspirated prenasalised affricates such as /ndZH/. It is also shown that prenasalisation occurs with implosives as well as with voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated stops.

Cet article traite des consonnes occlusives de l'alsacien. Les résultats présentés proviennent des enregistrements de trois locutrices de l'alsacien, également francophones. Elles ont été enregistrées dans leur langue maternelle, l'alsacien. Le corpus d'étude comprends toutes les consonnes occlusives de l'alsacien (transcrites à l'écrit comme en français : p t k et b d g). L'analyse de ces enregistrements montre d'une part que les deux séries de consonnes occlusives de l'alsacien ne sont jamais sonores, mais que leur distribution correspond à celles de paires minimales oppositives. La distinction entre les deux séries repose donc sur d'autres indices, tels que les durées intra-segmentales, notamment les durées des silences au sein même des deux séries de consonnes.

Recent experimental studies have documented the weakening of both voiceless (e.g. Lewis, 2000: 2001) and voiced Spanish stops in intervocalic position (e.g. Cole, Hualde & Iskarous, 1999; Ortega-Llebaria, 2004). In addition, synchronic and diachronic studies have repeatedly proposed the existence of a correlation between weakening of voiced and voiceless stops (e.g. Lloyd, 1993). However, very few studies have systematically analyzed both weakening processes in the same variety (Lavoie, 2001), and even fewer have presented experimental evidence demonstrating the existence of such a correlation. In this paper, we analyze the status of both processes in Argentine Spanish in order to motivate hypotheses that would account for diachronic changes in Spanish as well as in other Romance languages. In particular, we evaluate three competing approaches to lenition. The first approach, henceforth Hypothesis A, predicts a positive correlation between an increasing rate of approximantization and deletion of voiced stops and increasing voicing of voiceless stops across places of articulation (e.g. Martinet, 1952; Lloyd, 1993; Wireback, 1997). This approach, which is basically diachronic in nature, sees lenition as a stage towards deletion. The second approach, or the effort-based hypothesis-Hypothesis B-, (Kirchner, 2004; Blevins, 2004) analyzes lenition as effort reduction. As such lenition involves a decrease in the degree of constriction of a given gesture as well as a decrease in duration. Thus, this approach predicts that more effortful gestures should lenite more than less effortful ones, and that the degree of lenition should be affected by the vocalic context. Consequently, we expect to find (i) weakening of voiceless stops; (ii) a higher rate of weakening with more open vowels; (iii) no effect of place of articulation. Finally, the third approach, namely the perception-based hypothesis-Hypothesis C-(Kingston, 2008), stipulates that lenition is an index of the degree of perceptual separation between two constituents. As such, this hypothesis predicts: (i) that the vocalic environment should not affect the degree of weakening; and (ii) more lenition of voiced than of voiceless stops. 2. Intervocalic stop lenition in Spanish Diachronic stop weakening is documented at various stages in the evolution from Latin to Romance languages, as evidenced in processes like degemination, approximantization, deletion and voicing of voiceless stops (Wireback, 1997). A recurrent problem has been to establish which of these processes initiated the change in Spanish, in which order the change proceeded, and whether these processes influenced each other. Lloyd (1993) views stop weakening as a chain shift; thus acknowledging correlations among degemination, voicing of voiceless stops and approximantization of voiced stops. Specifically, Lloyd reports instances of voicing of intervocalic voiceless stops (LUPU> lobo 'wolf') alternating with voiceless stops at different stages of the evolution, and across regions of the Iberian Peninsula. Since the 'newly' voiced intervocalic voiceless stops may have overlapped with the original voiced stops and produced confusions in meaning, the latter were fricativized, weakly articulated, or, in some cases, deleted (as the alveolars, CRUDELE > cruel 'cruel'). So, according to Lloyd's approach, the voicing of intervocalic voiceless stops implied the fricativization of voiced stops. Also, as a result of the voicing processes, geminate stops simplified to voiceless singletons (CUPPA > copa 'glass';

The Arabic language is made up of a set of emphatic and guttural consonants that exert a phonological influence on adjacent segment sounds by moving the tongue's root back towards the pharynx. This paper discusses the pronunciation difficulties among Malaysian students who learn Arabic words. There are three approaches to account for the production and perception of Arabic segmental difficulties namely speech perception, phonology and phonetic. Data for this research were obtained from two sources: Shehata's study (2018) and observations of Malaysian mispronunciation which were recorded. Data analysis also displays five phonological aspects of mispronunciation involving: substitution, addition, interference, omission and vowel changes. A number of opaque and difficult phonemes of Arabic including :

This study presents the diversity of North African Judeo-Arabic dialects documented in an extensive course of fieldwork concerning some one hundred and thirty Moroccan Jewish dialects, both urban and rural. Dozens of additional dialects from Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria complete the global repartitioning of these dialects into four distinct groups: Eqa:l, Wqal, kjal, and ʔal dialects. The different dialects in each set share common phonetic, phonological, morphological, and grammatical features. All of them preserve the unvoiced realization of the stop /q/ and articulate it as a uvular [q] (Eqa:l and Wqal), a palato-velar [kj] (kjal), or a glottal [ʔ] (ʔal). Eqa:l dialects developed in Libya, Tunisia, and Eastern Algeria; they distinguish between long and short vowels. Wqal dialects developed in Western Morocco. Kjal dialects developed in northwestern Algeria and in southeastern Morocco. ʔal dialects developed in Moroccan cities, where Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal settled among native Jews.

The present study investigates the effect of gender and social class on the acoustic correlates of emphasis in Jordanian Arabic. To achieve this goal, 40 participants were recorded reading a list of minimal pairs, and several acoustic measurements were taken, including VOT (voiceless stops), post-release duration (voiced stops), friction duration, vowel duration, and vowel formant frequencies (F1-F3) at onset and midpoint positions. The results of the study reveal that significant gender and social class differences in emphasis production have different linguistic distributions. Gender differences were relevant at F1 and F2 at the onset and midpoint, whereas social class differences were evident at the onset position of F1 and F2, vowel duration, and the post-release duration of the voiced emphatic stop. Generally, male speakers produced stronger cues of emphasis, the non-prestigious form, than female speakers, as they made more F1 raising and F2 lowering in the emphatic environment. Strong emphasis cues were also favored by the lower-middle class speakers. The results also showed that the effect of gender significantly intersects with that of social class. At F1(onset and midpoint), significant gender differences existed only within the upper-class group. At F2 midpoint, however, gender differences were evident only in the lower-middle class group.

The book under review is unfortunately nothing less than a travesty. It is an insult to Celtic studies and linguistics in general and to the study of Irish in particular. Anna Bloch-Rozmej (henceforth AB) purports to investigate, within the framework of Government Phonology, the internal structure and external relations of the sounds of Connemara Irish with particular emphasis on the vowels. The best section is AB's discussion of the anomalous behaviour of s in initial clusters, a particularly important topic in Government Phonology. The semi-independent status of s in (initial) clusters Besprechungen und Anzeigen 312

Recently, phonologists have shown a great interest in nativisation of loanwords. The focus on loanword stems from the role nativisation plays in understanding L1 phonological system and how L2 elements are integrated into L1. Loanword adaptation often provides the insight for understanding the phonological system of L1 that is not necessarily obvious in the data of native speakers (Kang 2011). It also provides a window for studying how acoustic cues are categorised in terms of the distinctive features relevant to L1 phonological system (Calabrese and Wetzels 2009). Further, loanword adaptation explains how speakers of the borrower language integrate new elements into their phonological __________ ________________________________________________