Central vs. Back Vowels

Reconstruction of Old Chinese Back Vowels

This paper proposes a revised system of Old Chinese back vowels: *ɤ (之), *u (宵), *o (幽), *ɔ (侯) and *a (魚), which is purely monophthongal and may account for more related phenomena. There are such kinds of mixed rhymes in the Shijing: 之 and 幽, 宵 and 幽, 幽 and 侯. It is due to the sound similarity between the rhyme groups of each pair. The back vowels of Old Chinese widely experienced a raising-di...

Reduction of unstressed central and back vowels in Contemporary Standard Bulgarian

This paper reports two experiments that examine unstressed vowel reduction and neutralisation in Contemporary Standard Bulgarian. Stress-dependent F1 and F2 frequency variation was measured for the central and back vowel pairs in careful speech. The results reveal a less unequivocal picture of the pairwise convergence of formant frequencies than has previously been reported: the data confirm a ...

High Back Vowels in Scottish Gaelic

This study provides an acoustic phonetic analysis of some of the vowels in an endangered language with little phonetic documentation, Scottish Gaelic. It tests previous mainly impressionistic analyses which claim Scottish Gaelic has phonemic vowel length, and contrasts four high back vowels /u  o /. Results suggest four vowels are indeed contrasted, and that phonemic /u/ is divided into two p...

A first glimpse of mid back vowels in Girona Catalan

Mid back vowels [o] and [ɔ] appear to be merging in the Catalan spoken in the region of Girona. In this brief paper, we present preliminary data on the production of these vowels in one of the 12 designated survey points for the study of the phenomenon, the area of Ter-Brugent. The first results in this area show that our speakers present an almost complete merger of the mid back vowel pair, an...

Spectral analysis of pathological voices: sustained vowels vs running speech