Computational Approaches to Exploring Persian-Accented English

Methods involving phonetic speech recognition are discussed for detecting Persian-accented English. These methods offer promise for both the identification and mitigation of L2 pronunciation errors. Pronunciation errors, both segmental and suprasegmental, particular to Persian speakers of English are discussed

Structure and Types of Pashto Syllable

The syllable is the phonological element that plays a vital role in the formation of the word. A complete and standard syllable consists of the Onset, Nucleus, and Coda, but at the same time, the Onset or Coda part of the syllable can also fall down. No syllable can be constructed without Nucleus and vowel sounds. The vowel in the syllable structure has as much value as the syllable has in the word formation. These vowels play a fundamental role in the syllable’s distribution and types. This article explores the intricate structure and various types of syllables found in the Pashto language, primarily spoken in Afghanistan. Syllables play a fundamental role in linguistic analysis, as they constitute the building blocks of words and affect the rhythm, stress, and intonation patterns in speech. The findings of this study contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the Pashto language's syllable structure, shedding light on its unique phonological features. This knowledge holds significance for various fields, including linguistics, language teaching, and speech pathology, enabling researchers and language professionals to better analyze and comprehend the complexities of Pashto syllables

A List Of Descriptions Of Present ‐Day Languages

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/98311/1/j.1467-1770.1960.tb00729.x.pd

Temporal mystic and religious love : the poetry of the Taliban

Mina/Mohabbat oraz ishq to dwa pasztuńskie wyrazy używane do określenia dwóch rodzajów miłości. Pierwszy stosuje się względem miłości bardziej ludzkiej, podczas gdy drugi – względem miłości bardziej mistycznej. W artykule starałem się przeanalizować poezję Talibów, zwracając szczególną uwagę na te dwa typy uczuć – ludzki i boski. Przyczyną, dla której zdecydowałem się zająć tym tematem, jest fakt, iż większość badaczy zajmująca się fenomenem tejże poezji, zwraca większą uwagę na jej polityczny, propagandowy i religijny przekaz, i niewiele uwagi poświęcają jej 'ludzkiemu' wymiarowi. Stąd też postanowiłem przedstawić kilka wierszy ze zbioru "Poetry of the Taliban" autorstwa Alexa Strick van Linschotena i Felixa Kuehna (Gurgaon 2012), wzbogacając wywód o własne komentarze.Mina/Mohabbat and ishq are two Pashto words used to name two kinds of love. The first one is more human while the second is for divine or mystical one. In this paper I tried to analyse poetry of the Taliban, paying special attention to the question of the afore-mentioned kinds of love – human, divine and religious. I decided to do that because till now most of the researchers working on the Talibanʼs songs, focused more on its political, propaganda and religious message, with very little work dedicated to its 'human' character. This is why, I have presented several poems selected from the collection "Poetry of the Taliban" by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn (Gurgaon 2012) and enhanced my study with some comments

Post-focus compression in Brahvi and Balochi

Previous research has shown that post-focus compression (PFC) - the reduction of pitch range and intensity after a focused word in an utterance, is a robust means of marking focus, but it is present only in some languages. The presence of PFC appears to follow language family lines. The present study is a further exploration of the distribution of PFC by investigating Brahvi, a Dravidian language, and Balochi, an Indo-Iranian language. Balochi is predicted to show PFC given its presence in other Iranian languages. Dravidian languages have not been studied for prosodic focus before and they are not related to any languages with PFC. We recorded twenty native speakers from each language producing declarative sentences in different focus conditions. Acoustic analyses showed that, in both languages, post-focus f 0 and other correlates were significantly reduced relative to baseline neutral-focus sentences, but post-focus lowering of f 0, and intensity was greater in magnitude in Balochi than in Brahvi. The Balochi results confirm our prediction, while the Brahvi results offer the first evidence of PFC in a Dravidian language. The finding of PFC in a Dravidian language is relevant to a postulated origin of PFC, which is related to the controversial Nostratic Macrofamily hypothesis

Names of plants in Kalam Kohistani (Pakistan)

This paper presents a preliminary ethnobotanical lexicon of plant names in the Kalam Kohistani language, spoken in the mountainous north of Pakistan. The list includes 203 Kalam Kohistani plant lexemes, with their English and Urdu glosses; 137 of these are tentatively identified with their Latin scientific names. Many of the glosses include brief notes on the occurrence and local uses of the plants. The paper ends with an index of 116 English common plant names with their Kalam Kohistani equivalents, followed by an index of scientific names

Learning Environment Related Factors Affecting Afghan EFL Undergraduates’ Speaking Skill

Of the four language skills, speaking is usually considered an indicator of proficiency in a language. As an EFL student, one should master speaking skill (Nazara, 2012). Unfortunately, most Afghan EFL undergraduates are not as good at speaking as they are in the other three English language skills (reading, writing and listening). Most Afghan undergraduate EFL learners are good at reading and writing, but in part of oral communication, they are not accurate and fluent (Zia Sulan, 2015). Hence, this study was conducted to investigate the factors that affect the Afghan undergraduate EFL learners’ speaking skill at Sayed Jamaluddin Afghani University Kunar, Afghanistan. The study specifically investigated the learning environment-related factors that affected student speaking skill. A mixed method was used for this study, i.e., quantitative (questionnaire) and qualitative (interview). The questionnaire data were descriptively analyzed in SPSS version 20 and presented in figures and tables. The interview data were thematically analyzed and presented. A total of 90 students (40 junior and 50 senior) were purposively selected and participated in this study. The findings revealed that large classes and the lack of basic facilities in the speaking classroom were some factors in the learning environment that affected the students speaking skill. The current study’s findings will hopefully help teachers and educators be attentive and creative in building a proper learning environment to reduce the factors that affect students’ speaking skill

Homogenous Ensemble Phonotactic Language Recognition Based on SVM Supervector Reconstruction

Currently, acoustic spoken language recognition (SLR) and phonotactic SLR systems are widely used language recognition systems. To achieve better performance, researchers combine multiple subsystems with the results often much better than a single SLR system. Phonotactic SLR subsystems may vary in the acoustic features vectors or include multiple language-specific phone recognizers and different acoustic models. These methods achieve good performance but usually compute at high computational cost. In this paper, a new diversification for phonotactic language recognition systems is proposed using vector space models by support vector machine (SVM) supervector reconstruction (SSR). In this architecture, the subsystems share the same feature extraction, decoding, and N-gram counting preprocessing steps, but model in a different vector space by using the SSR algorithm without significant additional computation. We term this a homogeneous ensemble phonotactic language recognition (HEPLR) system. The system integrates three different SVM supervector reconstruction algorithms, including relative SVM supervector reconstruction, functional SVM supervector reconstruction, and perturbing SVM supervector reconstruction. All of the algorithms are incorporated using a linear discriminant analysis-maximum mutual information (LDA-MMI) backend for improving language recognition evaluation (LRE) accuracy. Evaluated on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) LRE 2009 task, the proposed HEPLR system achieves better performance than a baseline phone recognition-vector space modeling (PR-VSM) system with minimal extra computational cost. The performance of the HEPLR system yields 1.39%, 3.63%, and 14.79% equal error rate (EER), representing 6.06%, 10.15%, and 10.53% relative improvements over the baseline system, respectively, for the 30-, 10-, and 3-s test conditions