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Rachel Kesselman Advanced Phonetics 04.26.05 Rachel Kesselman Advanced Phonetics 04.26.05 Spectrographic and Auditory Analysis of Rhotic Variants in Modern Hebrew This project is designed to investigate the use of Modern Hebrew rhotics in casual speech. It has been hypothesized by several researchers that the place of articulation of rhotics changes in initial, medial, and final position. Therefore, subjects were asked to produce these rhotics in several different environments to determine an exact place of articulation (as well as a general understanding of which type of rhotic occurs within different environments). After these tokens have been recorded and analyzed, both an auditory and spectrographic analysis will be completed to further provide evidence of the place of articulation. Literature Review: Many studies of Hebrew phonology and phonetics take a historical-diachronic standpoint, and primarily investigate the pronunciation of Hebrew phonemes as handed down through written and oral traditions in various communities of the Jewish world. Therefore, current research in Modern Hebrew phonetics is difficult to find. Most of the data was collected throughout the 1970’s. The research is most likely out of date due to the rapid pace in which this language is changing. The most recent analysis of pronunciation in Modern Hebrew phonetics and acoustics is an article entitled An acoustic analysis of Modern Hebrew vowels and voiced consonants (Aronson et. al, 1996). This article analyzes the frequencies of the five monophthongal vowels and 9 voiced consonants in Modern Hebrew. The only rhotic analyzed in this study is the frictionless velar continuant, although the authors do acknowledge that other forms exist. Another piece of research that might provide some more details is a grammar of Modern Hebrew by Ora Schwarzwald. The grammar was published in Lincolm Europa in 2001, and also acknowledges some of the different variants of rhotics (although not in great detail). Finally, the most comprehensive phonetic description of Hebrew was published in 1977 as a dissertation in The Netherlands. Data was recorded from 29 native speakers, and the book analyzes Modern Hebrew consonants, vowels, stress, and intonation. Therefore, due to the lack of research in this area, my analysis will primarily be based on spectrographic analyses of rhotics from different languages. The data from these other languages will help describe what these sounds look like on a spectrogram, as well as approximate formant frequencies and shapes. Individual characteristics of rhotic pronunciation will be examined (which include the properties of fricatives, trills, and uvulars). Modern Hebrew Overview: Modern Hebrew is part of the Semitic language family. As a revived spoken language, it has only existed since about 1880. Throughout this time, native speakers have continued to coin new words, and different aspects of the language change very rapidly. The vocabulary is primarily based on Biblical Hebrew, but also includes borrowings from other languages such as Arabic and Greek. In many cases, there can be significant problems in obtaining accurate pronunciations of Hebrew words. In the past, a distinction was made between Ashkenazi and Sephardic pronunciation. In Standard Modern Hebrew, the Ashkenazi pronunciation (Jews living in Poland, Germany, etc) is considered to be the most prestigious (this pronunciation utilizes a uvular trill). However, there are still a large number of people that use the Sephardic pronunciation (Jews living in Spain and Portugal). It is difficult to determine exactly where Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews live today since most of the Jewish people live all throughout Israel. Therefore, because there is already a very small population of native Modern Hebrew speakers on this campus, this distinction will be abandoned. Rhotics: It is hypothesized that three different rhotics occur in casual speech. A summary of these realized phonemes and the environments that they most likely occur in are listed below. Sound Environment Example חור Voiced alveo- Word final dental trill position ‘Hole’ היא גרה Voiced uvular Initial and medial trill position ‘she lived’ following back vowels or consonants הפריט Voiced velar Following or fricative preceding ‘privatized’ (although fricatives frictionless in most cases) Rhotics in Hebrew can occur in several different environments. They are found in initial, medial, and final position. They are always followed by a vowel in initial and medial positions, but may also be part of a consonant cluster in the beginning of a word. Methodology: In order to participate in the study, subjects were required to meet specific criteria: 1. they must not exhibit any speech or hearing disorders 2. Israel must be their place of birth 3. Hebrew must be their native language 4. they must be between the ages of 18-58 There was one expected problem in collecting this data. Although all of the subjects were born in Israel and Hebrew is their native language, the majority of them (especially the older speakers) have lived in the United States for quite some time. Therefore, influences from English may affect their native pronunciation. The most likely place to carry out this study would be in Israel. Doing so would eliminate any outside influences from other languages because the study could be restricted to subjects that only speak Modern Hebrew. A total of 18 tokens were elicited from each speaker. These tokens consisted of a mixture of nouns, adjectives, and verbs. No borrowed words were used in this experiment. It is difficult to determine whether the rhotic pattern in borrowed words completely fits into the native pronunciation paradigm or whether there are other factors that come into play. Subjects pronounced six words in initial, medial, and final position. To reduce reading effects, the token words were embedded in a larger list of words. For each condition, the six token words appeared in a list of 20 words. This word list was carefully constructed to insure that the filler words did not have any influence on the token words. The word lists were provided to the subjects in Hebrew so they could read words in their native orthography (and to eliminate any confusion about the pronunciation of transliteration). A sample list of these tokens can be found below. Initial Medial Final rega - moment shirim - songs sefer - book rayon - idea mora - teacher mevugar - adult rasha - wicked aruchat - meal cadur - ball rahit - furniture martef - basement kar - cold ratsu - they ran tirgamti - I translated hor - hole rakevet - train aron - cupboard nayir - paper The recordings were collected in a quiet room using a head-mounted Altec Lansing AHS302 Headset with a frequency response of 20-16,000 Hz. To make and edit the initial recordings, Adobe Audition was used. The spectrographic analysis was performed using the acoustic analysis software Praat. Spectrographic Analysis of Rhotics: To analyze Modern Hebrew rhotics, there are several properties that will be investigated on the spectrogram. First, the general class of rhotics primarily displays a lowered F3 that is narrowly separated from F2. Therefore, regardless of the place and manner of articulation, I would expect each rhotic to display this general characteristic. The second property concerns fricatives. This class of sounds appears as high-frequency noise generated on a spectrogram. Although I mention that one of the rhotics is a velar fricative earlier in the paper, it is possible that the velar variant is a frictionless continuant (which may make spectrographic analysis more difficult because a high-frequency noise component will not be present). The next class of properties concerns those made when producing a trill. The trill is an easy component to distinguish on a spectrogram because it will display distinct pulsations depending on how fast or slow the sound is produced. The most difficult sound to distinguish from the others is a uvular consonant. Although extensive research has been completed on uvulars, a definitive answer still does not exist as to what characteristics differentiate uvulars from other back consonants. The property that has been most accepted by other scholars is that uvulars will display a very low F2, as well as a lower noise burst. Results: The results of this study differ greatly from the original hypothesis. First and foremost, both of the rhotic sounds used in Modern Hebrew are uvular. The two variants are a uvular trill and uvular approximant. The uvular trill is most often used in initial and medial position, while the uvular approximant is used a majority of the times in final position. The results of each subject are listed below. As is evident, there is substantial variation across speakers (which is primarily due to the distinction between Ashkenazoid and Sephardic pronunciation). Following a table of results, spectrograms for three out of the six words in initial, medial, and final position are presented. The spectrograms displayed exactly what was hypothesized for both of the rhotics: F3 narrowly separated from F2 as well as characteristics of trills and approximants. The energy in rhotics is far less than that of other consonants; therefore, several of the formants do not exhibit very dark bands of energy. In initial, medial, and final position, the formants and their transitions are actually very difficult to locate. In some of the final position tokens, it also appears as if the formants are absent. Most of the spectrograms also display a fairly low F2 for all of the rhotics, with several of the tokens occurring below 2,000 Hz. This (for the most part) indicates that these two sounds are uvular. Low F2 has been the one property that most scholars agree characterize rhotic and pharyngeal sounds. As for the approximants, it would be easier to identify them if they exhibited a high frequency noise component. Without this component, however, they appear very similar to an alveolar rhotic. This makes them very difficult to distinguish on a spectrogram. Token Sub. 101 Sub. 102 Sub.
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