International Society of communication and Development among universities www.europeansp.org Modern Language Studies, ISSN: 0047-7729

Comparison of English and Persian Language Rhythms with Persian Dashtab variant Rhythm

Ezatollah Kalantari Khandania*, Nafiseh Taghvab

aFarhangian University of , PhD candidate at Zahedan Azad Universiy, Kerman, 7618976338, bShahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Shiraz, 7186896491, Iran

Abstract

Studying language speech rhythm has been recently attracted by many linguists. This article delves into the quantitative features of Kerman Dashtab variant which is one of a number of Kerman variants. Therefore, the aims of this study are twofold: first, to survey in great depth, the durational variability of the speech rhythm for a less well-known language variant, named Kerman Dashtab variant; and second, to compare the rhythmic differences between British English and Persian rhythms with Kerman Dashtab variant. Traditionally, based on acoustic rhythmic measures, languages have been classified into syllable-timed, stress- timed, and mora-timed. Raw and normalized Pairwise Variability Indexes (rPVI and nPVI) help making this distinction. In this study both nPVI and rPVI are calculated using vocalic and consonantal durations. The results of the study show that although Persian is considered as a syllable-timed language, Kerman Dashtab variant, one variant of Persian language is somewhere between syllable-timed language such as Persian and stress-timed language such as English. Results confirm that Kerman Dashtab variant rhythm is somewhere between Catalan and Polish rhythm. In more exact words, Kerman Dashtab variant rhythm is very close to Catalan and Polish rhythm. This has been partly due to the vowel reduction in unstressed positions.

Keywords: Persian rhythm, Kerman Dashtab variant rhythm, Pairwise Variability Index (PVI), syllable-timed, stress-timed.

1. Introduction

The rise and fall of the breath is possibly the first rhythm man notices, its earliest recognition may be the starting point of an appreciation common to men, and its rhythmic sequences in later life will continue to be an ever present standard of measurement and comparison (Harris, 1895). We move from the rhyme of nature to the rhyme of language and music (Patel, 2010). As human beings are a part of the nature, these natural functioning mechanisms tremendously affect them. These rhymes will influence our health, physical strength and spiritual balance. Therefore,

Downloaded from mls.europeansp.org at 6:11 +0330 on Saturday October 2nd 2021 we need to know and understand the reality of these natural phenomena which have strong effect on our life. Language and music define us as human (Patel, 2010:3). And both of them enjoy rhythm. Rhythm is a systematic patterning of sound in terms of timing, accent and grouping (Patel, 2010:96). In the present paper, we investigate to compare the British English rhythm (Grabe & Low, 2002) and Persian rhythm (Taghva, Abolhasani Zedeh, & Golshan, 2014) with the acoustic-phonetic basis of one of the Persian variant rhythm, named Kerman Dashtab variant. Kerman is one of the vastest provinces in south-east of Iran. Dashtab

© 2016 The Authors. Published by European Science publishing Ltd. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of European Science publishing Ltd. 2 Author name / Modern Language Studies, ISSN: 0047-7729(2017)101_107

variant is one of a number of Kerman variants spoken in the west of Kerman. Persian, the predominant modern descendant of Old Persian, is one of the Western Iranian languages within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo- European language family (Windfuhr, 2009). Dashtab is a rural district with 49 villages. It is located in the central district of County, (the census of the Islamic Republic of Iran ,2006). In phonology, prosody refers collectively to variations in pitch, loudness, tempo and rhythm (Crystal, 2012:393). Pike (1945) and Abercrombie (1967) have defined rhythm as an effect involving the isochronous recurrence of some type of speech units shown in all spoken languages. The theory of Isochrones (the rhythmic property of having some interval with stable duration) introduced by (Pike 1945; Abercrombie 1967; Ladefoged 1975) has traditionally classified languages into rhythmic groups: syllable-timed, stress-timed and mora-timed languages. It has been hypothesized that in stress-timed languages, intervals between stresses or rhythmic feet are almost equal, whereas in syllable-/mora timed languages, successive syllables or moras are of near-equal length. linguists have claimed that isochrony theory lacked experimental support and put forward counter arguments against it (Beckman,1992; Laver, 1994; Wenk, Wioland, 1982; Manrique & Signorini, 1983). Based on the counter arguments, stress-timed and syllable-timed languages have phonetic and phonological differences. And the percept of rhythm has an acoustic basis. It means interstress intervals are not the same and far from equal in both stress- timed and syllable-timed languages. Neither of them shows any better behavior and more regular patterns than the other one (Shen and Peterson, 1962; Bolinger, 1965; Delattre, 1966; Faure, Hirst and Chafcouloff 1980). Regarding morae languages irregular length of moraes are also detectable (Pointon, 1980; Wenk and Wiolland, 1982; Roach 1982; Dauer, 1983, 1987). Roach (1982) experimentally defied Abercrombie's claims (1967). He concluded that quantifying time intervals in speech could not specify rhythm classes. Dauer (1983, 1987) expounded her views on comparisons of data from continuous texts in English, Thai, Spanish, Italian, and Greek. She demonstrated that interstress intervals in English, a stress-timed language, are no more isochronous than interstress intervals in Spanish, a syllable-timed language, or any of the other languages studied. That is why she considers the correlation of stress- and syllable-timing as ineffective and infers from her distinction between stress-timed and syllable-timed languages that the differences are due to syllable structure, vowel reduction, and the phonetic percept of stress. She says that rhythmic grouping takes place even in languages that have been called syllable-timed. To solve this problem many linguists put emphasis on the durational patterning of vocalic and intervocalic intervals in speech (Ramus, Nespor, & Mehler, 1999; Grabe & Low, 2002). The new emphasis attracted a lot of attention and showed that the degree of vowel reduction and variability in stress-timed languages are greater than in syllable-timed languages (Nespor, 1990 and Grabe & Low, 2002); it also laid attention on the permission of complex syllables and the degree of consonant duration which is greater in syllable-timed languages than in stressed-timed ones (Ramus et al., 1999). Moreover, the isochrony theory is completely clear-cut and it cannot be effective. Dauer (1987), therefore, thought of a continuum and tried to theorize about a range of two ends. On one end there are syllable-timed languages and on the other one stress-timed languages. Languages may be more or less stress- or syllable-timed. This fuzzy and holistic outlook led linguists to distinguish more accurately the stress-/syllable timing differences by introducing factors involved in rhythm metrics. Metric is defined quantitatively, in terms of the number of constructs used in formulating an analysis (Crystal, Downloaded from mls.europeansp.org at 6:11 +0330 on Saturday October 2nd 2021 2012:437). So, in respect of rhythm metrics, some metrics and formulas are needed to measure the vocalic and intervocalic intervals in order to classify the languages more appropriately. Ramus, et al., (1999) initiated reckoning interval basis in speech to sort out languages rhythmically. Although some different metrics have been suggested by linguists, the most prevalent ones belong to Ramus, et al., (1999) and Grabe & Low (2002). The proportion of vocalic intervals (%V); the Standard Deviation of vocalic intervals (ΔV) and the Standard Deviation of consonantal intervals (ΔC) have been put forward by (Ramus et al., 1999). And vocalic nPVI, normalized Pairwise Variability Index, as well as intervocalic rPVI, raw Pairwise Variability Index, were made known by Grabe & Low (2002). To quantify PVI, four steps have been recognized:  first, discovering the vocalic and intervocalic intervals;  second, computing the duration differences between each pair of neighboring intervals;  third, finding the mean duration of each pair;  and finally, fourth, setting up the average ratio of each pair (Ladefoged and Johnson, 2011: 252).

Author name / Modern Language Studies, ISSN: 0047-7729(2017)101_107 3

(1) 1

In normalized Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI), m stands for the number of vocalic intervals in the speech and dk is the duration of the kth interval. On the contrary, in raw Pairwise Variability Index (rPVI), m stands for the number of intervocalic intervals and dk is the duration of the kth interval.

(2)

Some empirical researches have been done. It has been uncovered that the durational variability of intervocalic intervals is greater in stress-timed languages e.g. British English and Dutch than in syllable-timed languages e.g. Spanish, French, and Italian (Ramus et al., 1999). It has also been grasped by (Grabe and Low, 2002) that vocalic duration is more alterable in stress-timed languages such as British English, Dutch, and German than in syllable- timed languages such as French and Spanish. The last finding can convey the idea that timed-based patterning of vowels is a causative factor in showing the rhythmic sensation of a language.

Table 1. PVI of different languages (extracted from Grabe & Low.2002) Language nPVI rPVI Thai 65.8 56.5 Dutch 65.5 57.4 German 59.7 55.3 British English 57.2 64.1 Tamil 55.8 70.2 Malay 53.6 66.3 Greek 48.7 59.6

Downloaded from mls.europeansp.org at 6:11 +0330 on Saturday October 2nd 2021 Welsh 48.2 54.7 Rumanian 46.9 47.6 Polish 46.6 79.1 Catalan 44.6 67.8 French 43.5 50.4 Japanese 40.9 62.5 Luxembourg 37.7 55.4 Spanish 29.7 55.7 Mandarin 27 52

2. Method

4 Author name / Modern Language Studies, ISSN: 0047-7729(2017)101_107

To compare the durational variability of British English (Grabe & Low, 2002) and Persian (Taghva, Abolhasani Zedeh, & Golshan, 2014) with the acoustic-phonetic basis of one of the Persian variant rhythmic features of Kerman Dashtab variant, two monolingual native speakers of the variant participated in the experiment. Their mean age was 73 years (woman: 71 years; man: 75 years). The two participants had normal vision and hearing. None of them needed hearing aids or glasses. Although they were old, they were sharp and completely familiar with Kerman Dashtab variant. Their prodigious memory was amazing. Both subjects were able to read the utterances clearly. They contributed in our experiment undoubtedly impressive. For the sake of assurance, they were trained carefully to get the most reliable data. They were asked to speak out the selected sentences to be recorded. More than 30 simple declarative sentences were spoken out and recorded in a quiet room in the participants’ homes in Dashtab. Subjects were given time prior to the recordings to practice reading the sentences. When errors or hesitations occurred during the recording, subjects were asked to repeat them at the end of the session. Recordings were analyzed by the software Praat. In Praat, segmentation and labelling or annotations are the main object, recordings are exploited to create TextGrids. Each TextGrid consists of vocalic and intervocalic tires. For the present study, related TextGrids have been made for each sentence separately to determine the durational variability of vowels and consonants by nPVI and rPVI. An example of a simple declarative Kerman Dashtab variant TextGrid is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. An example of a TextGrid for a simple declarative Dashtab variant (image taken from Praat - nPVI: 49.32; rPVI : 44.36) /taxte sang-e teneki didam/. Translation: I saw a flat stone.

Then, the present study attempts to compare the values of the three chosen languages, namely, British English and Persian with Kerman Dashtab variant. Durational variabilities of the selected languages, British English and Persian, are taken from Grabe & Low, (2002) and Taghva, Abolhasani Zedeh, & Golshan, (2014) respectively. British English has been documented as stress-timed languages while Persian was claimed to be in syllable-timed group. The chosen languages demonstrate the typical phonological properties, namely, a wide variety of syllable structure Downloaded from mls.europeansp.org at 6:11 +0330 on Saturday October 2nd 2021 types, a high frequency of complex syllable structures, vowel reduction in unstressed positions, and a substantial final lengthening (Wightman, Shattuck-Hufnagel, Ostendorf, Price, 1992 and Taghva, Abolhasani Zedeh, & Golshan, 2014).

3. Results and Discussion

Rhythm brings about the true integration and positive relationship with nature into our lives. It is measured by the regular succession of strong and weak intervals. Among the natural rhythm, investigating speech rhythm, a prosodic feature of languages, has recently opened new dimensions to linguists, musicians, composers and biologists. Studying in great depth the durational variability of the speech rhythm for a less well-known language variant, named Kerman Dashtab variant helps linguists to classify the languages more appropriately. The present study displays the raw and normalized Pairwise Variability Indexes (rPVI and nPVI) of Dashtab variant. Both of them are calculated using vocalic and consonantal durations. Results confirm that Kerman Dashtab variant rhythm is Author name / Modern Language Studies, ISSN: 0047-7729(2017)101_107 5

somewhere between syllable-timed and stress-timed languages near to the syllable-timed languages in the continuum of languages. The values nPVI and rPVI are summarized in table 2.

Table 2. The display of the rhythmical features of chosen languages an Dashtab variant

Language rPVI nPVI description

British English 64.1 57.2 Grabe & Low, 2002

Persian 61.88 40.36 Taghva, Abolhasani, & Golshan, 2014

Dashtab Variant 72.4 48.27 The present study

This study also shows that, in addition to consonantal and vocalic durations, syllable durations can potentially be useful in distinguishing speech rhythm. However, empirical data supporting this idea have been lacking. This has been partly due to the difficulty of developing and applying comparable quantitative measures to melody and rhythm in speech and music. The results of the study show that although Persian is considered as a syllable-timed language, Kerman Dashtab variant, one variant of Persian language is somewhere between syllable-timed language such as Persian and stress-timed language such as English. The results also confirm that Kerman Dashtab variant rhythm is very close to Catalan and Polish rhythm (Figure, 2). This has been partly due to the vowel reduction in unstressed positions (Abdolalizade, 2013).

Downloaded from mls.europeansp.org at 6:11 +0330 on Saturday October 2nd 2021

Figure 2. The Kerman Dashtab variant position based on Grabe and Lows' Work (2002)

6 Author name / Modern Language Studies, ISSN: 0047-7729(2017)101_107

Persian is a language with various accents and variants, investigating on rhythmic features of these variants can be a good idea for further researches.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the native speakers of Kerman Dashtab variant who read the sentences of this study.

References

References

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