On Syllable Weight in Amharic

Syllable-Based Speech Recognition for Amharic

Amharic is the Semitic language that has the second large number of speakers after Arabic (Hayward and Richard 1999). Its writing system is syllabic with Consonant-Vowel (CV) syllable structure. Amharic orthography has more or less a one to one correspondence with syllabic sounds. We have used this feature of Amharic to develop a CV syllable-based speech recognizer, using Hidden Markov Modeling...

Syllable Weight

Syllable-based and hybrid acoustic models for Amharic speech recognition

This paper presents the results of our experiments on the use of hybrid acoustic units in speech recognition and the use of syllable and hybrid acoustic models (AM) in morphemebased speech recognition. Although hybrid AMs did not bring improvement in speech recognition performance when words are used as dictionary entries and units in a language model (LM), we observed a significant word error ...

Gradient syllable weight and weight universals in quantitative metrics*

Homeric Greek, Kalevala Finnish, Old Norse andMiddle Tamil are all languages in which weight is claimed to be exclusively binary in the poetic metrics. As I demonstrate through corpus studies of these traditions, the poets were sensitive to additional grades of weight, such that finely articulated continua of syllable weight can be inferred from distributional asymmetries in the metres. Across ...

Syllable weight and segmental durations in Finnish

At least four factors have been shown to have a reliable effect on segmental durations in Finnish (apart from such global effects as speech tempo and position within the utterance). The best known and most obvious of these factors is the quantity opposition, separately for vowels and consonants (and independently of word stress). Finnish thus has words like taka, taaka, takka, taakka, takaa, ta...