Resolving Hiatus by Diphthongisation in Romanian

2006

Cette étude concerne les trois aspects suivants : (1) la constitution de corpus-les critères de collection et le filtrage de données audio, les différents problèmes concernant la segmentation du signal de parole, (2) l'exploration de corpus-l'analyse acoustique et la modélisation statistique de données conversationnelles, la comparaison de méthodes d'extraction manuelles vs. automatiques, et (3) la représentativité du corpus pour illustrer la variation phonétique et phonologique en roumain.

Phonology, 2007

Romance languages show hiatus and diphthongal realisations of inherited iV sequences of rising sonority (e.g. ia). We study five Romance varieties with different degrees of contrast between the two realisation types: Romanian, with a diphthong-hiatus contrast, Spanish, with a weaker contrast, French, with no contrast (all diphthongs), and European and Brazilian Portuguese, with no contrast (all hiatus). We show that the different degrees of synchronic contrast are related to three independent factors : (i) a general articulatory tendency for [iV] hiatus to resolve to diphthongs, due to the relative stability of diphthongal articulations ; (ii) a structural ' attractor ' effect of pre-existing [jV] diphthongs in a language, from different historical sources ; and (iii) prosodic lengthening effects which inhibit the shift from hiatus to diphthong, supported by phonetic studies of durational patterns across the five languages.

Speech Communication, 1999

The aim of this study is to determine the acoustic properties of hiatuses (vowel-vowel sequences) and diphthongs (glide-vowel sequences) in Spanish and to observe how these properties are modi®ed depending on communicative factors. To do this, two groups of data were used: speech samples gathered from conversations between two speakers participating in the execution of a map task, in which the corpus items corresponded to toponyms, and the reading of the same sequences at a normal speaking rate. The comparison was done phonetically and phonologically: ®rst, diphthongs and hiatuses were analyzed acoustically, studying their duration and spectral dynamics, and later, an inventory of diphthongizations and monophthongizations was made. Results show that hiatuses and diphthongs dier in the temporal and frequential domain: hiatuses have a longer duration and a greater degree of curvature in the F2 trajectory than diphthongs. Dierences between the two categories (hiatus and diphthong) exist in both communicative situations, although changes within each category due to the speech situation were also observed: sequences from the map task are shorter and the degree of curvature of their formant trajectories is lower than for the reading task. We have also found that vowel-vowel and glide-vowel sequences behave dierently in the way they are phonetically reduced: a reduction axis can be drawn in which hiatuses become diphthongs, and diphthongs vowels. It is concluded that hiatus and diphthong are two phonetic categories which can be described on the basis of their acoustic characteristics and are subject, like any other phonetic category, to modi®cations due to a change in the communicative situation. Ó 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Ecuadorian Spanish in the 21st Century: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Rosario Gómez, Erin O'Rourke, and Christina García, Cambridge Scholars Publishing., 2022

This chapter employs a phonetics-phonology approach to describe the emergence of an emphatic, utterance final -f observed in informal speech in Quito Spanish. Common in simple responses such as sif ‘yes’ and nof ‘no’, this sociolectal feature, referred to as sifeísimo (Adams 2015), has been attributed to the devoicing of the common filler word, pues ‘then, well, cos’ (Haboud and de la Vega 2008). The present analysis utilizes moraic phonology, couched in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004; McCarthy and Prince 1995), along with the principles of gestural coordination, as represented in Articulatory Phonology (Browman and Goldstein 1989, 1990), to show how an existing dialectal preference for vowel devoicing and the bilabial pronunciation of <f> favor the emergence of sifeísmo in the Quito context.

2000

This paper provides a close examination of how Spanish speakers syllabify sequences of vocoids of rising sonority within the lexicon (e.g., piano 'piano' , persiana 'blind' or historia 'history'). A survey with 246 words administered to 15 Peninsular Spanish speakers has enabled us to examine in a quantitative way the strength of prosodic and morphological conditions on the appearance of the so-called exceptional hiatuses . The data in our study reveals that the word initiality effect is not as strong as stated in the literature and that there are large differences between speakers: within the same dialect, half of the informants have the word-initiality effect in words such as piano 'piano' or diálogo 'dialogue' , while the rest have practically generalized the presence of a diphthong in this position. Interestingly, morpheme boundary effects are found in conservative speakers and their conditions differ depending on the paradigm: (a) in nominal forms, gliding is blocked when there is an intervening morpheme boundary and when the glide is a high back vowel (virt[u.Áo]so 'virtuous' vs. od[Ájo]so 'hateful' , act[u.Áa]l 'present' vs. cord[Ája]l 'cordial'); (b) in verbal paradigms, gliding is blocked when there is an intervening morpheme boundary and when the high vowel can be stressed in some form of the paradigm (conf[i.Áa]r 'to trust ' , confío 'I trust' vs. camb[Ája]r 'to change' , cambio 'I change'). In general, the situation indicates that language change is in progress and that, for some speakers, the presence of lexical items that are pronounced with a hiatus is gradually disappearing. The article presents an analysis in terms of a correspondence-based OT analysis which captures the prosodic and analogical forces governing this process together with the interspeaker variation found in the data.

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae Philologica, 2018

Languages have been in contact since their existence. The Hungarian and Romanian languages have been so for at least 800 years. The present article aims at analysing the structural changes in the monosyllabic Hungarian loanwords in Romanian. After the theoretical introduction, I discuss the phonological status of the /j/ sound, which is very important in this kind of investigations. After that, I present the syllable structure types of these monosyllabic Hungarian etymons and I present, as well, the changing schemes of their structures in the borrowing. The study concludes that the most affected parts of the syllables are the nucleus and the coda.

2018

Simbiti [ssc] is a Bantu language, spoken in the Mara Region of Tanzania. Simbiti has seven vowel phonemes /i, e, ɛ, a, ɔ, o, u/, as well as contrastive vowel length; it also exhibits one tautosyllabic diphthong /ai/. Because of the language’s agglutinative nature, word-internal sequences of vowels are frequently created. Generally, vowel sequences are not permitted in Simbiti, and this paper examines the strategies employed to resolve word-internal vowel hiatus, including: vowel elision, diphthongisation, glide formation, and glide epenthesis. Both vowel elision and glide formation result in compensatory lengthening of a subsequent vowel. All the vowel hiatus resolution strategies, as well as any resultant compensatory lengthening, have implications for decisions concerning the Simbiti orthography; therefore, this paper also describes the relevant orthography decisions that have been made by the Simbiti community, including any significant factors and motivations. The instincts and opinions of mother-tongue speakers were especially helpful and influential, particularly regarding glide epenthesis, both in the phonological analysis and the resulting orthography decisions. This research should prove helpful in contributing to the body of knowledge on how Bantu languages handle vowel hiatus. MA Thesis, Redcliffe College - University of Gloucester, 2018

Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, 2009

An Act to consolidate and amend the laws relating to reorganisation and insolvency resolution of corporate persons, partnership firms and individuals in a time bound manner for maximisation of value of assets of such persons, to promote entrepreneurship, availability of credit and balance the interests of all the stakeholders including alteration in the order of priority of payment of Government dues and to establish an Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India, and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto.