An Acoustic Analysis Of Amharic Vowels Plosives And Ejectives

This research set out to study the vowels, and pulmonic and ejective stops of Amharic, arnSouth Ethio-Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia. Data from four males and four femalesrnwas recorded at the Phonetics lab established at the Akaki Campus of Addis AbabarnUniversity using the Kay CSL 4400 multisignal acquisition and analysis device.rnThe F0, F1, F2, F3 values of Amharic vowels in /tVt/ context were computed andrnpresented. The F1-F2 plot of Amharic vowels showed that the so called ‘high centralrnvowel’ was not really high, but high mid, and the so called ‘mid central vowel’ was foundrnto be not mid, but low mid, close to the cardinal vowel [ɜ]. Thus a new four-height vowelrnsystem has been proposed based on the results of this study. Amharic vowels were foundrnlonger before voiced stops than before voiceless stops, and they were longer beforernsingletons than before geminates conforming to attested patterns in other languages. Arndiscriminant analysis showed that F1 and F2 alone could be used to classify with 86.7%rnaccuracy, whereas the addition of F0 and F3 values in the discriminant analysis increasedrnit to 90 % correct classification for all subjects collapsed across genders. Using Normalizedrnvalues the classification results rose to 94 %.rnThe acoustic analysis of stops showed that total burst duration and relative intensity camernout strong in classifying stops by place of articulation. Bilabials had the highestrnclassification results followed by velars and alveolars had the least classification results.rnVOT and spectral mean were the most important acoustic cues that classified voiced stopsrnwith a correct classification result of 94.9 % and voiceless stops up to 89 %. VOT alone wasrnable to classify 81.4 % of the stops correctly. Jitter perturbation, spectral mean and voicingrnlag came out as relatively stronger acoustic cues that identified airstream. Nevertheless,rnclassification using the numerical results of jitter perturbation, spectral mean and voicingrnlag did not produce expected results though it has been found that Amharic ejectivesrnresult in creaky phonation on the following vowel. Amharic ejectives have been found tornhave more characteristics of slack ejectives than of stiff ejectives.

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