The High Classical Style and Phonetics - Assignment Example

Phonetics assignment Literature review In all world languages, sounds are divided into two; vowels and consonants. Vowels are essential in construction of syllables as they are almost ever in the central position in a syllable. Vowels are distinguished by various properties including position of the tongue, shape of the lips and the raising or lowering of the tongue that gives different vowel qualities. According to Odisho (2005), a diphthong or glide denotes two contiguous vowel sounds that occur within the same syllable implying that two distinct targets, the tongue and/or another speech apparatus, moves during its pronunciation. Contrary, a monophthong is a pure vowel sound whose articulation at the beginning and the end is comparatively fixed. In his research, Yousef candidly states that Arabic is currently the world’s 2nd most spoken language considering the large number of people who speak it all over the world. Disparagingly, it has received less attention from researchers and scholars and little has been done in reference to its acoustics. The (MSA)Modern Standard Arabic has two diphthongs -/ay/ أي"" , with the glide beginning from the vowel /a/ to consonant /y/ as evident in the word /bayt/بيت. The second diphthong is -/aw/ "أو" where the glide begins from /a/ to /w/ as in / nawm / (sleep) (Odisho, 2005). Noteworthy, its diphthongs are a combination of consonant and vowel. Moreover, further research indicates that it is Lebanese dialect that is conserving the original pronunciations having /e/ and /o/ as the only diphthongs. The other dialects within Arabic have been tainted with dialectical speeches and do not preserve this original articulation but contain the aforementioned diphthongs. English has eight diphthongs divided into two; centering and closing diphthongs. Centering diphthongs end with a glide -/ɪə/ towards /ə/, the central vowel. At the beginning of the glide, the tongue position is at /I/ and moves towards /ə/ as found in ‘beer’. Other centering diphthongs are -/ʊə/ and -/ eə/ as found in ‘sure’ and ‘chair’ respectively. The closing diphthongs end with a slither towards / ʊ/ or /i/. Such diphthongs include -/ei/, -/ɔɪ/, -/ai/, -/əʊ/ and -/aʊ/ (Odisho, 2005). Moreover, the MSA and English have monophthongs that are at times confused or merged with diphthongs. MSA stands out with only 3 monophthongs as indicated in figure 1 below. Arabic depends on the 3 monophthongs in all its constructions and this indicate why the language is sometimes perceived to be limited in application although a large population presently uses it. Relative to cardinal vowels, English has several monophthongs as indicated in the figure below; (Robert,2013). Evidently, both MSA and English have diphthongs and monophthongs which are significantly different and whose articulation differs semantically. Moreover, vowels in English are more specific than those in Arabic. However, according to Verhoeven and Daniel (2011), the Arabic vocalic system is founded on 3 imperative phonemes; the short /a i u/ and their long counterparts which are /a: i: u:/. Interestingly, he further indicates that there are other diaphonic and conditional variants but the insufficient thoughtfulness given to the allophonic variation is rather disparaging. Introduction Phoneticians are currently thinking acoustically and ostensibly use physiological imagination to express the notion. Any investigation of Arabic diphthongs and monophthongs throws up several provocative issues connected to the presence of a normative variety beside local dialects. The classical Arabic (MSA) and dialectical Arabic tend to raise an issue of concern and debate due to acrolectal pronunciations (Odisho, 2005). The differences in frequency of English vowels and Arabic vowels has also been a matter of concern considering the minute monographs on Arabic vowels that many individuals can hardly access. This paper shall seek to explore the acoustic elements of Arabic vowels and compare them with those of English and my vowels to determine whether acoustic elements are affected by cross-dialectical structures. Methodology I verbalized several vowels including bid, buoyed, bide, Buddha, bode, bade, body, bed, bad, bead, put and bud and recorded them using the PRAAT software and manually segmented into formants1 and 2 on the basis of their visual information and audio assessment. I kept on changing the speed, intensity, and duration of pronouncing the vowels, and glottal movements could be felt. I later put the vowels in an Excel file and convert it to TXT format so as to be normalized in the normalization site. Analysis of the characteristics of the vowels revealed some interesting results. Results and discussion Normalization of the words indicated the following results; Evidently, the values for F1 and F2 differ significantly. ‘Bed’ has the lowest F1 value 0.5Hz and ‘bad’ has the highest F1 value of about 1.8 Hz. The F1 and F2 frequency of ‘bad’ above is significantly similar to that of ‘had’ (Standard English) below. From the vowel plot diagram, F1 values for /a/ are relatively high but for /u/, the values are medium, and minimum for /i/. Additionally, the F2 values for /a/ are medium, /u/ has minimum values, and /i/ has the highest values as evident in the Vplot above. Nevertheless, the F2 values for the vowels spread from 0.6 Hz to 1.8 Hz. The frequencies of vibration changes across the words and is significantly different as compared to the same words in Standard English obtained from other experiments. Similarly, the values are different if compared with values taken from a Quran recital session where recitation style ranged from tartil (very slow) to hadr (very fast). All vowels of approximately 25 minutes of recitation were recorded using PRAAT. Below is a figure of the acoustic characteristics of Quran vowels (Verhoeven & Daniel, 2011). (Verhoeven & Daniel, 2011) From the Quran vowel plot, it is evident that the short vowels are more centrally positioned than the long vowels. Noteworthy, this trend is more forthright for the high vowels but a statistical examination designates that the differences observed are non-significant. Conclusion Indeeed, the findings indicate that there is no High Classical Style that is acoustically purer form of MSA. The High Classical Style is tainted by regional speech varieties. Moreover, the High Classical Style vowels are almost not at acoustic extremes. However, further research is required to further elucidate on the issue of cross-dialectical speeches and their effects on the acoustic features of the original dialect. Bibliography Alotaibi, Y. A., & Hussain, A. (2009). Formant Based Analysis of Spoken Arabic Vowels. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-04391-8_21 Odisho, E. Y. (2005). Techniques of teaching comparative pronunciation in Arabic and English. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. Retrieved from http://books.google.co.ke/books?id=6YNohRnQ6j8C&pg=PA90&lpg=PA90&dq=arabic+and+english+diphthong&source=bl&ots=eXLnUhxatL&sig=e-Dz-wWsfDEpm_dspAx7d76xypU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QxpeVK_pOtLXasDJgpgH&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=arabic%20and%20english%20diphthong&f=false Robert, M. (2013). US English Monophthongs. Retrieved from http://clas.mq.edu.au/speech/phonetics/phonetics/vowelgraphs/USE_Monophthongs.html Verhoeven. J. & Daniel, L. (2011). Frequency Analysis of Arabic Vowels in Connected Speech. 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