Northern Tosk Albanian
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
The Festvox Indic Frontend for Grapheme-To-Phoneme Conversion
The Festvox Indic Frontend for Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion Alok Parlikar, Sunayana Sitaram, Andrew Wilkinson and Alan W Black Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, USA aup, ssitaram, aewilkin, [email protected] Abstract Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems convert text into phonetic pronunciations which are then processed by Acoustic Models. TTS frontends typically include text processing, lexical lookup and Grapheme-to-Phoneme (g2p) conversion stages. This paper describes the design and implementation of the Indic frontend, which provides explicit support for many major Indian languages, along with a unified framework with easy extensibility for other Indian languages. The Indic frontend handles many phenomena common to Indian languages such as schwa deletion, contextual nasalization, and voicing. It also handles multi-script synthesis between various Indian-language scripts and English. We describe experiments comparing the quality of TTS systems built using the Indic frontend to grapheme-based systems. While this frontend was designed keeping TTS in mind, it can also be used as a general g2p system for Automatic Speech Recognition. Keywords: speech synthesis, Indian language resources, pronunciation 1. Introduction in models of the spectrum and the prosody. Another prob- lem with this approach is that since each grapheme maps Intelligible and natural-sounding Text-to-Speech to a single “phoneme” in all contexts, this technique does (TTS) systems exist for a number of languages of the world not work well in the case of languages that have pronun- today. However, for low-resource, high-population lan- ciation ambiguities. We refer to this technique as “Raw guages, such as languages of the Indian subcontinent, there Graphemes.” are very few high-quality TTS systems available. -
Phonetics and Phonology in Russian Unstressed Vowel Reduction: a Study in Hyperarticulation
Phonetics and Phonology in Russian Unstressed Vowel Reduction: A Study in Hyperarticulation Jonathan Barnes Boston University (Short title: Hyperarticulating Russian Unstressed Vowels) Jonathan Barnes Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures Boston University 621 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 119 Boston, MA 02215 Tel: (617) 353-6222 Fax: (617) 353-4641 [email protected] Abstract: Unstressed vowel reduction figures centrally in recent literature on the phonetics-phonology interface, in part owing to the possibility of a causal relationship between a phonetic process, duration-dependent undershoot, and the phonological neutralizations observed in systems of unstressed vocalism. Of particular interest in this light has been Russian, traditionally described as exhibiting two distinct phonological reduction patterns, differing both in degree and distribution. This study uses hyperarticulation to investigate the relationship between phonetic duration and reduction in Russian, concluding that these two reduction patterns differ not in degree, but in the level of representation at which they apply. These results are shown to have important consequences not just for theories of vowel reduction, but for other problems in the phonetics-phonology interface as well, incomplete neutralization in particular. Introduction Unstressed vowel reduction has been a subject of intense interest in recent debate concerning the nature of the phonetics-phonology interface. This is the case at least in part due to the existence of two seemingly analogous processes bearing this name, one typically called phonetic, and the other phonological. Phonological unstressed vowel reduction is a phenomenon whereby a given language's full vowel inventory can be realized only in lexically stressed syllables, while in unstressed syllables some number of neutralizations of contrast take place, with the result that only a subset of the inventory is realized on the surface. -
Vowel Sounds Can Symbolise the Felt Heaviness of Obje
CORRESPONDENCES AND SYMBOLISM Cross-Sensory Correspondences in Language: Vowel Sounds can Symbolise the Felt Heaviness of Objects Peter Walker1,2 & Caroline Regina Parameswaran2 1 Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, UK 2 Department of Psychology, Sunway University, Malaysia Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Peter Walker, Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YF, UK e-mail: [email protected] tel: +44 (0) 1524 593163 fax: +44 (0) 1524 593744 1 CORRESPONDENCES AND SYMBOLISM Abstract In sound symbolism, a word's sound induces expectations about the nature of a salient aspect of the word's referent. Walker (2016a) proposed that cross-sensory correspondences can be the source of these expectations and the present study assessed three implications flowing from this proposal. First, sound symbolism will embrace a wide range of referent features, including heaviness. Second, any feature of a word's sound able to symbolise one aspect of the word's referent will also be able to symbolise corresponding aspects of the referent (e.g., a sound feature symbolising visual pointiness will also symbolise lightness in weight). Third, sound symbolism will be independent of the sensory modality through which a word's referent is encoded (e.g., whether heaviness is felt or seen). Adults judged which of two contrasting novel words was most appropriate as a name for the heavier or lighter of two otherwise identical hidden novel objects they were holding in their hands. The alternative words contrasted in their vowels and/or consonants, one or both of which were known to symbolise visual pointiness. Though the plosive or continuant nature of the consonants did not influence the judged appropriateness of a word to symbolise the heaviness of its referent, back/open vowels, compared to front/close vowels, were judged to symbolise felt heaviness. -
Roger Lass the Idea: What Is Schwa?
Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 15, 1986, 01-30 doi: 10.5774/15-0-95 SPIL 15 (]986) 1 - 30 ON SCHW.A. * Roger Lass The idea: what is schwa? Everybody knows what schwa is or do they? This vene- rable Hebraic equivocation, with its later avatars like "neutral vowel", MUT'melvokaZ, etc. seems to be solidly es tablished in our conceptual and transcriptional armories. Whether it should be is another matter. In its use as a transcriptional symbol, I suggest, it represents a somewhat unsavoury and dispensable collection of theoretical and empirical sloppinesses and ill-advised reifications. It also embodies a major category confusion. That is, [8J is the only "phonetic symbol" that in accepted usage has only "phonological" or functional reference, not (precise) phone tic content. As we will see, there is a good deal to be said against raJ as a symbol for unstressed vowels, though there is often at least a weak excuse for invoking it. But "stressed schwa", prominent in discussions of Afrikaans and English (among other languages) is probably just about inex ·cusable. v Schwa (shwa, shva, se wa , etc.) began life as a device in Hebrew orthography. In "pointed" or "vocalized" script (i.e. where vowels rather than just consonantal skeletons are represented) the symbol ":" under a consonant graph appa rently represented some kind of "overshort" and/or "inde terminate" vowel: something perhaps of the order of a Slavic jeT', but nonhigh and generally neither front nor back though see below. In (Weingreen 1959:9, note b) it is described as,"a quick vowel-like sound", which is "pronounced like 'e' in 'because'''. -
SSC: the Science of Talking
SSC: The Science of Talking (for year 1 students of medicine) Week 3: Sounds of the World’s Languages (vowels and consonants) Michael Ashby, Senior Lecturer in Phonetics, UCL PLIN1101 Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology A Lecture 4 page 1 Vowel Description Essential reading: Ashby & Maidment, Chapter 5 4.1 Aim: To introduce the basics of vowel description and the main characteristics of the vowels of RP English. 4.2 Definition of vowel: Vowels are produced without any major obstruction of the airflow; the intra-oral pressure stays low, and vowels are therefore sonorant sounds. Vowels are normally voiced. Vowels are articulated by raising some part of the tongue body (that is the front or the back of the tongue notnot the tip or blade) towards the roof of the oral cavity (see Figure 1). 4.3 Front vowels are produced by raising the front of the tongue towards the hard palate. Back vowels are produced by raising the back of the tongue towards the soft palate. Central vowels are produced by raising the centre part of the tongue towards the junction of the hard and soft palates. 4.4 The height of a vowel refers to the degree of raising of the relevant part of the tongue. If the tongue is raised so as to be close to the roof of the oral cavity then a close or high vowel is produced. If the tongue is only slightly raised, so that there is a wide gap between its highest point and the roof of the oral cavity, then an open or lowlowlow vowel results. -
Glossary of Key Terms
Glossary of Key Terms accent: a pronunciation variety used by a specific group of people. allophone: different phonetic realizations of a phoneme. allophonic variation: variations in how a phoneme is pronounced which do not create a meaning difference in words. alveolar: a sound produced near or on the alveolar ridge. alveolar ridge: the small bony ridge behind the upper front teeth. approximants: obstruct the air flow so little that they could almost be classed as vowels if they were in a different context (e.g. /w/ or /j/). articulatory organs – (or articulators): are the different parts of the vocal tract that can change the shape of the air flow. articulatory settings or ‘voice quality’: refers to the characteristic or long-term positioning of articulators by individual or groups of speakers of a particular language. aspirated: phonemes involve an auditory plosion (‘puff of air’) where the air can be heard passing through the glottis after the release phase. assimilation: a process where one sound is influenced by the characteristics of an adjacent sound. back vowels: vowels where the back part of the tongue is raised (like ‘two’ and ‘tar’) bilabial: a sound that involves contact between the two lips. breathy voice: voice quality where whisper is combined with voicing. cardinal vowels: a set of phonetic vowels used as reference points which do not relate to any specific language. central vowels: vowels where the central part of the tongue is raised (like ‘fur’ and ‘sun’) centring diphthongs: glide towards /ə/. citation form: the way we say a word on its own. close vowel: where the tongue is raised as close as possible to the roof of the mouth. -
How to Edit IPA 1 How to Use SAMPA for Editing IPA 2 How to Use X
version July 19 How to edit IPA When you want to enter the International Phonetic Association (IPA) character set with a computer keyboard, you need to know how to enter each IPA character with a sequence of keyboard strokes. This document describes a number of techniques. The complete SAMPA and RTR mapping can be found in the attached html documents. The main html document (ipa96.html) comes in a pdf-version (ipa96.pdf) too. 1 How to use SAMPA for editing IPA The Speech Assessment Method (SAM) Phonetic Alphabet has been developed by John Wells (http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa). The goal was to map 176 IPA characters into the range of 7-bit ASCII, which is a set of 96 characters. The principle is to represent a single IPA character by a single ASCII character. This table is an example for five vowels: Description IPA SAMPA script a ɑ A ae ligature æ { turned a ɐ 6 epsilon ɛ E schwa ə @ A visual represenation of a keyboard shows the mapping on screen. The source for the SAMPA mapping used is "Handbook of multimodal an spoken dialogue systems", D Gibbon, Kluwer Academic Publishers 2000. 2 How to use X-SAMPA for editing IPA The multi-character extension to SAMPA has also been developed by John Wells (http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/x-sampa.htm). The basic principle used is to form chains of ASCII characters, that represent a single IPA character, e.g. This table lists some examples Description IPA X-SAMPA beta β B small capital B ʙ B\ lower-case B b b lower-case P p p Phi ɸ p\ The X-SAMPA mapping is in preparation and will be included in the next release. -
Learning [Voice]
University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations Fall 2010 Learning [Voice] Joshua Ian Tauberer University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the First and Second Language Acquisition Commons Recommended Citation Tauberer, Joshua Ian, "Learning [Voice]" (2010). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 288. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/288 Please see my home page, http://razor.occams.info, for the data files and scripts that make this reproducible research. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/288 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Learning [Voice] Abstract The [voice] distinction between homorganic stops and fricatives is made by a number of acoustic correlates including voicing, segment duration, and preceding vowel duration. The present work looks at [voice] from a number of multidimensional perspectives. This dissertation's focus is a corpus study of the phonetic realization of [voice] in two English-learning infants aged 1;1--3;5. While preceding vowel duration has been studied before in infants, the other correlates of post-vocalic voicing investigated here --- preceding F1, consonant duration, and closure voicing intensity --- had not been measured before in infant speech. The study makes empirical contributions regarding the development of the production of [voice] in infants, not just from a surface- level perspective but also with implications for the phonetics-phonology interface in the adult and developing linguistic systems. Additionally, several methodological contributions will be made in the use of large sized corpora and data modeling techniques. The study revealed that even in infants, F1 at the midpoint of a vowel preceding a voiced consonant was lower by roughly 50 Hz compared to a vowel before a voiceless consonant, which is in line with the effect found in adults. -
The Nature of Vocoids Associated with Syllabic Consonants in Tashlhiyt Berber
THE NATURE OF VOCOIDS ASSOCIATED WITH SYLLABIC CONSONANTS IN TASHLHIYT BERBER John Coleman University of Oxford, UK ABSTRACT pronounced as [4], >T], or >^], with brief vocoids before and Tashlhiyt Berber has entered the phonological folklore as an sometimes after the tap, and between the individual closures of unusual language in which any consonant can be syllabic, many trills. Consonants may be contrastively geminate, even word- words consisting entirely of consonants. I shall argue for an initially (e.g. /VVI9I9C/ ‘be washing clothes’). Typically for an alternative analysis, according to which the epenthetic vowels Afroasiatic language, many words are formed by intercalating which frequently accompany syllabic consonants are the phonetic realizations of syllable nuclei. Where no epenthetic vowel is independent vowel and consonant melodies, e.g. singular C5CM95 K5WMC5 evident, it can be regarded as hidden by the following consonant, / / ‘pile of stones’, plural / /. I shall refer to phonemic according to a gestural overlap model. On this view, Tashlhiyt /i/, /u/, and /a/ as ‘lexical vowels’ and to the so-called syllable structure is a quite unmarked CV(C(C)), and ‘transitional schwas’ as ‘epenthetic vowels’. syllabification is unproblematic. 2. MATERIALS 1. INTRODUCTION 2.1. Recordings Many influential phonology texts (e.g. [9, 13]) repeat Dell and In the absence of a Tashlhiyt dictionary, an unsorted list of 555 Elmedlaoui’s analysis of Tashlhiyt [3], which holds that all words was collated from various papers. Each word was written µ µ µ Tashlhiyt phonemes, even obstruents, are sometimes syllabic, and down in the frame sentence “ini za — yat tklit CF P KP ” (‘please that numerous words consist only of consonants (e.g. -
Behind Stone Walls
BEHIND STONE WALLS CHANGING HOUSEHOLD ORGANIZATION AMONG THE ALBANIANS OF KOSOVA by Berit Backer Edited by Robert Elsie and Antonia Young, with an introduction and photographs by Ann Christine Eek Dukagjini Balkan Books, Peja 2003 1 This book is dedicated to Hajria, Miradia, Mirusha and Rabia – girls who shocked the village by going to school. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface Berita - the Norwegian Friend of the Albanians, by Ann Christine Eek BEHIND STONE WALLS Acknowledgement 1. INTRODUCTION Family and household Family – types, stages, forms Demographic processes in Isniq Fieldwork Data collection 2. ISNIQ: A VILLAGE AND ITS FAMILIES Once upon a time Going to Isniq Kosova First impressions Education Sources of income and professions Traditional adaptation The household: distribution in space Household organization Household structure Positions in the household The household as an economic unit 3. CONJECTURING ABOUT AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PAST Ashtu është ligji – such are the rules The so-called Albanian tribal society The fis The bajrak Economic conditions Land, labour and surplus in Isniq The political economy of the patriarchal family or the patriarchal mode of reproduction 3 4. RELATIONS OF BLOOD, MILK AND PARTY MEMBERSHIP The traditional social structure: blood The branch of milk – the female negative of male positive structure Crossing family boundaries – male and female interaction Dajet - mother’s brother in Kosova The formal political organization Pleqësia again Division of power between partia and pleqësia The patriarchal triangle 5. A LOAF ONCE BROKEN CANNOT BE PUT TOGETHER The process of the split Reactions to division in the family Love and marriage The phenomenon of Sworn Virgins and the future of sex roles Glossary of Albanian terms used in this book Bibliography Photos by Ann Christine Eek 4 PREFACE ‘Behind Stone Walls’ is a sociological, or more specifically, a social anthropological study of traditional Albanian society. -
The Tune Drives the Text - Schwa in Consonant-Final Loan Words in Italian
The tune drives the text - Schwa in consonant-final loan words in Italian Martine Grice1, Michelina Savino2, Alessandro Caffò2, Timo B. Roettger1 1IfL-Phonetics, University of Cologne, Germany 2Dept. of Education, Psychology, Communication, University of Bari, Italy [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] ABSTRACT Although Italian has a very limited number of con- sonant-final words in its native vocabulary, the lan- In Italian, consonant-final loan words are reportedly guage has incorporated a great number of such produced with or without a final schwa. This paper words in recent years, including many proper nouns reveals that variation in the presence of this schwa is [6]. Crucially, their pronunciation is subject to varia- dependent on a number of factors, including the tion [2, 13, 17, inter alia]. Monosyllabic words such metrical structure of the target word and the voicing as ‘chat’ can retain the structure of the donor lan- of the consonant. Crucially, it is also conditioned by guage (in this case English) with the consonant in intonation: Schwa is more likely to occur – and is final position, /͡tʃat/, or the consonant can be fol- acoustically more prominent – when the intonational lowed by a mid central vocoid (henceforth schwa): tune is complex or rising, as opposed to falling. /͡tʃatːə/. Schwa epenthesis can thus be seen as facilitating the Studies on Italian generally analyse this non- production of functionally relevant tunes. lexical word-final schwa as an epenthetic vowel, rather than a phonetic artefact. One strong argument Keywords: Italian, tune-text association, schwa, for its phonological status is that it goes hand in compression, epenthesis hand with a lengthened (geminated) consonant. -
Unicode Alphabets for L ATEX
Unicode Alphabets for LATEX Specimen Mikkel Eide Eriksen March 11, 2020 2 Contents MUFI 5 SIL 21 TITUS 29 UNZ 117 3 4 CONTENTS MUFI Using the font PalemonasMUFI(0) from http://mufi.info/. Code MUFI Point Glyph Entity Name Unicode Name E262 � OEligogon LATIN CAPITAL LIGATURE OE WITH OGONEK E268 � Pdblac LATIN CAPITAL LETTER P WITH DOUBLE ACUTE E34E � Vvertline LATIN CAPITAL LETTER V WITH VERTICAL LINE ABOVE E662 � oeligogon LATIN SMALL LIGATURE OE WITH OGONEK E668 � pdblac LATIN SMALL LETTER P WITH DOUBLE ACUTE E74F � vvertline LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH VERTICAL LINE ABOVE E8A1 � idblstrok LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH TWO STROKES E8A2 � jdblstrok LATIN SMALL LETTER J WITH TWO STROKES E8A3 � autem LATIN ABBREVIATION SIGN AUTEM E8BB � vslashura LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH SHORT SLASH ABOVE RIGHT E8BC � vslashuradbl LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH TWO SHORT SLASHES ABOVE RIGHT E8C1 � thornrarmlig LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN LIGATED WITH ARM OF LATIN SMALL LETTER R E8C2 � Hrarmlig LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H LIGATED WITH ARM OF LATIN SMALL LETTER R E8C3 � hrarmlig LATIN SMALL LETTER H LIGATED WITH ARM OF LATIN SMALL LETTER R E8C5 � krarmlig LATIN SMALL LETTER K LIGATED WITH ARM OF LATIN SMALL LETTER R E8C6 UU UUlig LATIN CAPITAL LIGATURE UU E8C7 uu uulig LATIN SMALL LIGATURE UU E8C8 UE UElig LATIN CAPITAL LIGATURE UE E8C9 ue uelig LATIN SMALL LIGATURE UE E8CE � xslashlradbl LATIN SMALL LETTER X WITH TWO SHORT SLASHES BELOW RIGHT E8D1 æ̊ aeligring LATIN SMALL LETTER AE WITH RING ABOVE E8D3 ǽ̨ aeligogonacute LATIN SMALL LETTER AE WITH OGONEK AND ACUTE 5 6 CONTENTS