High Back Vowels in Scottish Gaelic
نویسنده
چکیده
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 phonetically distinct allophones. Phonemic vowel length is robustly maintained, but younger and older speakers differ in some areas for vowel quality: for younger speakers one allophone of /u/ is moving closer to /i/, and the other allophone of /u/ has merged with /o/.
منابع مشابه
gdbank: The beginnings of a corpus of dependency structures and type-logical grammar in Scottish Gaelic
We present gdbank, a small handbuilt corpus of 32 sentences with dependency structures and categorial grammar type assignments. The sentences have been chosen to illustrate as broad a range of the unusual features of Scottish Gaelic as possible, particularly nouns being used to represent psychological states where more thoroughly-studied languages such as English and French would prefer a verb,...
متن کاملPreaspirated stops in the English of Scottish Gaelic-English bilinguals
Preaspirated voiceless stops, a well-documented feature of Scottish Gaelic, have also been anecdotally observed in the English spoken in the Scottish Hebrides island chain. This paper presents the first sociophonetic study of preaspirated stops in Hebrides English. Analysis of speech produced by 24 male and female Gaelic-English bilinguals aged 19-75 found that, while most participants produced...
متن کاملDeveloping an Automatic Part-of-Speech Tagger for Scottish Gaelic
This paper describes an on-going project that seeks to develop the first automatic PoS tagger for Scottish Gaelic. Adapting the PAROLE tagset for Irish, we manually re-tagged a preexisting 86k token corpus of Scottish Gaelic. A double-verified subset of 13.5k tokens was used to instantiate eight statistical taggers and verify their accuracy, via a randomly assigned hold-out sample. An accuracy ...
متن کاملStatistical models for text normalization and machine translation
Irish and Scottish Gaelic are closely-related languages that together with Manx Gaelic make up the Goidelic branch of the Celtic family. We present a statistical model for translation from Scottish Gaelic to Irish that we hope will facilitate communication between the two language communities, especially in social media. An important aspect of this work is to overcome the orthographical differe...
متن کاملThe Legend of Brigadoon: Architecture, Identity and Choice in the Scottish Highlands
Since the nineteenth century two distinct domestic architectural traditions in the Scottish Highlands have been interpreted in Britain as representative of Highland and Scottish identity. But Scotland's positive national identification with both the indigenous turf-walled and thatched Highland blackhouse and the imposed white, regular forms of the eighteenth-century " improved cottage " and far...
متن کامل