Romanian a cinsti in the light of some Romanian-Slavic contacts

A group of Slavic loanwords with epenthetic /n/ in the Romanian language, to which a cinsti belongs, is considered. Interpreting the existing set of facts, the author supposes that the semantic convergence between the Slavic честь ‘honour’ and угощение ‘treat’appeared as far back as the Late Slavic period. The Romanian a cinsti, which is an early Slavic borrowing, also clearly testifies Slavic origin of this semantic convergence. Accordingly, the Ukrainian частувати and Polish częstowac appeared independently from each other, as well as from the Romanian a cinsti. Whereas the Romanian a cinsti (and cinste), as well as the whole group of Slavic loanwords in the Romanian language with the epenthetic sound /n/, are the result of early contacts of the Romanian language with some late Slavic dialect (or dialects), which was characterized by a tendency of widespread epenthetic nasal vowels. We can suppose that some traces of this for-Slavic dialect (dialects) could also be found in the Carpathian Ukrainian dialects as well. In particular, such traces, perhaps, should include both the Ukrainian dialectal чандрий, шандрий, чендрий and another Ukrainian dialectal form, recorded in the Bulaesti village, /мон|золетеи / ‘procrastinate; fiddling around in vain’ (in Russian: ‘мусолить; впустую теребить’).

A sketch of Ngen phonology

The paper provides a preliminary description of the phonology of Ngen, a South Mande language spoken in Ivory Coast. Ngen has a system of oral and nasal vowels. The consonant inventory is characterised by a complementary distribution between [b] and [m], [l] and [n], [y] and [ɲ]. There are 3 level tones. Tone melodies on disyllabic feet exhibit all possible combinations except LH. The majority of nonderived words have CV, CVCV, and CVŋ structures.

The origin of nasality in Macedonian dialects

There is general consensus that the southern Macedonian dialects have partially retained the Proto-Slavic nasal vowels, and that the preservation was favoured by local Greek phonetics. There was, however, an additional source of (non-etymological) nasality in Macedonian – the Greek pre-nasalisation of stops. In the article, I would like to re-examine this issue in terms of the hypothesis that the source of nasality in Macedonian dialects was not the old nasal vowels, but the Greek pre-nasalisation of stops.

Mispronunciation of High Front and Low Hausa Vowels among the Yorùbá Speakers

Pronunciation in second language learning is sometimes challenging, especially the vowels. Vowels such as [i] and [a] are found both in Hausa and Yorùbá but [i:] and [a:] are peculiar to Hausa alone. While Hausa has short and long vowels, Yorùbá has only oral and nasal vowels in their vowel inventories. Such phonemic differences constitute learning challenges, especially for the Yorùbá native speakers. This is a cross-sectional study design using mixed methods to examines the production of high front vowels: [i], and [i:], as well as low: [a], and [a:] Hausa vowels by the Yorùbá speakers to identify which group perform better between group 1 (Yorùbá native speakers who learned Hausa in the secondary school before going to the college of education), and group 2 (Yorùbá native speakers who learned Hausa informally before going to the college of education). The study also seeks to find out vowel substitutions that occur in the pronunciation tasks using 80 participants from 18 years old and above from the College of Education system in Nigeria who were selected based on purposive sampling. The findings were discussed in line with Flege & Bohn’s (2020) ‘Revised Speech Learning Model’. 8 stimuli were audio-recorded, transcribed, and rated by two independent raters, in addition to participant observation techniques adapted. The results of the Mann-Whitney test revealed that group 2 performed better than group 1. The study discovered also that the short [a] in the first and second syllables had the highest frequency of substitution compared to [i], [i:] and [a:] vowels. Such problems have pedagogical implications for learning Hausa as a second language.

Phonetics of White Hmong vowel and tonal contrasts

Hmong languages, particularly White Hmong, are well studied for their complex tone systems that incorporate pitch, phonation, and duration differences. Still, prior work has made use mostly of tones elicited in their citation forms in carrier phrases. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of both the vowel and tone systems of White Hmong from recordings of read speech. We confirm several features of the language, including the presence of nasal vowels (rather than derived nasalized vowels through coarticulation with a coda [ŋ]), the description of certain tone contours, and the systematic presence of breathy and creaky voice on two of the tones. We also find little evidence of additional intonational f0 targets. However, we show that some tones vary greatly by their position in utterance, and propose novel descriptions for several of them. Finally, we show that $\textrm{H}1^{\!*}$ –H2*, a widely used measure of voice quality and phonation in Hmong and across languages, does not adequately distinguish modal from non-modal phonation in this data set, and argue that noise measures like Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) are more robust to phonation differences in corpora with more variability.

Dialect in the consciousness of rural inhabitants (the example of Kielce and Opoczno regions)

The subject matter of the article is the way in which the rural population of two regions, namely Kielce and Opoczno, sees their language. Field studies were conducted in 2018, involving mainly the oldest residents of the village of Lasocin, Kielce County (1993–1997 and later) and 40 villages in Opoczno County in 2018. The responses, recorded using a voice recorder, show that they treat dialect as a variety of language of a limited geographical range: mainly local (borders of one village, several neighbouring villages); regional (e.g. Silesia, Kaszuby, Kielce, Opoczno, Podhale, Kurpie and others), characteristic of the oldest generation. The dialect is also, in their opinion, a vital indicator of local identity, an essential element of community ties (cf. mówić po nasemu). The dialect in the consciousness of the speakers is distinguished by certain linguistic features from the phonetic subsystem, e.g. a narrowed vowel articulation a→o, e→i, y, articulation broadening i, y→e, e.g. piełka, bieł, beła, labialisation of the initial o, denasalisation of nasal vowels ą→o, ę→e, and lexis, e.g. kaj, źmioki, zaściegacka, podwyrze, plindze, nizinier.

Generating Vowel Nasality for a Rule-Based Bangla Speech Synthesizer

Bangla is a useful language to study nasal vowels because all the vowels have their corresponding nasal vowel counterpart. Vowel nasality generation is an important task for artificial nasality production in speech synthesizer. Various methods have been employed by many researchers for generating vowel nasality. Vowel nasality generation for a rule-basedspeech synthesizer has not been studied yet for Bangla. This study discusses several methods using full spectrum and partial spectrum for generating vowel nasality to use in a rule-basedBangla text to speech (TTS) system using demisyllable. In a demisyllable based Bangla TTS 1400 demisyllables are needed to be stored in database. Transforming the vowel part of a demisyllable into its nasal counterpart reduces the speech database size to 700 demisyllables. Comparative study of the e