Lexicography in Gabon : a survey

This paper traces the historical development of lexicography in Gabon. Gabon, like most African countries, is multilingual. The recent inventories of languages spoken in Gabon are those established by Jacquot (1978) and Kwenzi-Mikala (1998). According to Kwenzi-Mikala (1997), there are 62 speech forms divided into 10 language groups or language-units in Gabon. These speech forms co-exist with French, the official language. In fact, in article 2 of paragraph 8 of the revised Constitution of 1994 the following can be read: "The Gabonese Republic adopts French as the official language. Furthermore, she endeavours to protect and promote the national languages." This constitutional arrangement naturally makes French the language used in education, administration and the media. The survey of lexicography in Gabon that is presented here includes the linguistic situation in and the language policy of Gabon, the lexicographic survey itself, as well as the lexicographic needs of the different speech forms (including languages and dialects). Initially, the pioneers of Gabonese lexicography were missionaries or colonial administrators. Very little was done in this field by the Gabonese themselves. Although credit is to be given to these early works, there are a number of shortcomings regarding the linguistic as well as the metalexicographic contents of dictionaries and lexicons produced during this period. In fact, the main weak point of those studies was the lack of tones in the written transcription of oral productions and orthographic problems. Furthermore, in those contributions, the theory of lexicography is largely unknown and lexico-graphic works are hardly ever based on authentic data corpora of the languages being described.Le présent article retrace l'histoire de la discipline lexicographique au Gabon. Comme la plupart des pays africains, le Gabon est un état multilingue. Les classifications établient par Jacquot (1978) et Kwenzi-Mikala (1998) sont souvent citées comme les travaux d'inventaire les plus récents sur les parlers gabonais. Selon Kwenzi-Mikala (1997), le Gabon compte 62 parlers reparties en 10 unités-langues. Les dits parlers cohabitent avec le français qui faut-il le rappeler jouit d'un statut particulier. En effet, à l'article 2 du paragraphe 8 de la Loi fondamentale révisée de 1994, on peut lire ceci: «La République gabonaise adopte le français comme langue officielle. En outre, elle s'engage à protéger et à promovoir les langues nationales». Cette disposition constitutionnelle fait naturellement du français le véhicule et la matière de l'instruction, la langue de l'administration et celle des médias. L'état des lieux de la lexicographie au Gabon présenté ici prend en compte la situation et la politique linguistique au Gabon, l'état des connaissances lexicographiques à proprement parler ainsi que les besions lexicographiques des différents parlers au regard de ce qui existe déjà. Les premiers travaux à caractère lexicographique ont été réalisés essentiellement par les missionnaires et les administrateurs coloniaux. Très peu de gabonais étaient engagés dans la confection des dictionnaires et lexiques à cette époque pionnière. Enfin, il convient de souligner que le principal talon d'Achille de ces travaux de la première heure est à la fois linguistique et métalexicographi-que. En effet, la majorité de ces travaux ne prennent pas en compte le système tonal des parlers décrits et s'inscrivent rarement dans un cadre théorique défini. Enfin, ils souffrent de nombreuses insuffisances orthographiques et sont rarement basés sur des corpus linguistiques

Kabyle "Double" Consonants: Long or Strong?

This paper describes the results of an acoustic experiment designed to test the properties of Kabyle Berber's "double" consonants. There is a debate in the literature as to whether these "double" consonants should be analyzed as geminate, long or fortis consonants. I outline the acoustic predictions which each of these labels entail, then measure the acoustic properties of a series of Kabyle words containing both singleton and "double" consonants. Based on the results of the experiment, I conclude that the label "fortis" is the most appropriate for Kabyle "double" consonants

A Diachronic Analysis of Schwa in French

Since the beginning of the formal study of language, linguists have struggled with the phonological problems posed by the mid-central vowel sound schwa. Schwa poses a series of challenges for linguists who study many languages, and this is particularly true for phonologists and phoneticians who specialize in French. Most of the challenges that come from analyzing the articulations of schwa in French arise from the overlap it has with mid- and open-mid-front-rounded vowels in French such as in the second vowel in the word “atelier” (workshop) and the second vowel in the word “appeler” (to call.) In this study a diachronic (historic) analysis of schwa in the French language is performed in order to more easily explain the problems that schwa poses for Franco-linguists today. First of all, the nature of schwa is described and how schwa’s behavior plays into its role in Modern French. Problems proposed by reduced schwa vowels and the phonological processes that cause these reductions in Modern French are described. Vowel reduction is a phonetic process that occurs when changes in the articulation of the vowel such as stress, sonority, and loudness cause the vowel to be “weaker.” Finally, a diachronic analysis of the historical environments of schwa from Old French to Modern French is conducted in order to attempt to explain the challenges posed by schwa in modern French. The methodology for this paper involves finding the phonetic environments in which schwa has traditionally appeared from Old French to Modern French. Changes in the environments between each time period of French are finally examined to see how those changes have influenced modern phonological processes that influence the articulation of schwa. This study has shown that the disappearance and appearance of sounds in the phonemic inventory of French has greatly impacted how schwa is articulated in Modern French. Other linguistic processes such as labialization that were realized on schwa in the past are no longer realized, but they have proven to be essential in shaping the current vowel inventory of French

Systeme Phonetique De Français

Le français et l'indonésien sont deux langues qui possèdent un caractère un peu différent. Le français possède beaucoup de bonnes choses dont on ne peut pas trouver en indonésien ou à l'invers. L'une de ces bonnes choses c'est le système phonétique. Le système phonétique français est accentué, et l'indonésien est non-accentué.Le système phonétique du français se divise en deux grandes parties, c'est la voyelle et la consonne.Les voyelles français se composent de: [a], [e], [i], [o], [ɔ], [ǝ], [ε], [œ], [y], [u], [ø], [õ], [ã], [ε], [œ], et les consonnes sont : [b], [c], [d], [f], [g], [h], [ʒ], [k], [l], [m], [n], [p], [R], [s], [t], [v], [w], [j], [ʃ], [z], [ɲ], [ɳ], [ks], [gz], [Ч].Ce que l'auteur a déjà inscrit au dessus que le système phonétique possède un caractère unique. Mots Clés : Phonétique, Françai

A Timing Model for Fast French

Models of speech timing are of both fundamental and applied interest. At the fundamental level, the prediction of time periods occupied by syllables and segments is required for general models of speech prosody and segmental structure. At the applied level, complete models of timing are an essential component of any speech synthesis system. Previous research has established that a large number of factors influence various levels of speech timing. Statistical analysis and modelling can identify order of importance and mutual influences between such factors. In the present study, a three-tiered model was created by a modified step-wise statistical procedure. It predicts the temporal structure of French, as produced by a single, highly fluent speaker at a fast speech rate (100 phonologically balanced sentences, hand-scored in the acoustic signal). The first tier models segmental influences due to phoneme type and contextual interactions between phoneme types. The second tier models syllable-level influences of lexical vs. grammatical status of the containing word, presence of schwa and the position within the word. The third tier models utterance-final lengthening. The complete segmental-syllabic model correlated with the original corpus of 1204 syllables at an overall r = 0.846. Residuals were normally distributed. An examination of subsets of the data set revealed some variation in the closeness of fit of the model. The results are considered to be useful for an initial timing model, particularly in a speech synthesis context. However, further research is required to extend the model to other speech rates and to examine inter-speaker variability in greater detail

Balto-Slavic accentual mobility

Thomas Olander’s dissertation (2006) offers a useful introduction to the history of Balto-Slavic accentuation supported by an impressive command of the scholarly literature

Fast and Slow Speech Rate: a Characterisation for French

This paper is concerned with the evaluation of speech rate in French. Usually, this dynamic parameter is described as a unidimensional quantitative dimension. It is shown that the slowing down of speech has also major qualitative effects that must be taken into account. The theory on slowing down speech is thus revised

iPhocomp : calcul automatique de l’indice de complexité phonétique de Jakielski

National audienceThe index of phonetic complexity was introduced by Jakielski in order to estimate the difficulty to pronounce some words in English. Comparative studies about several language pathologies, in several languages, have observed distinct behavior among the studied subjects facing words with various phonetic complexity indices. We provide a web interface based on a phonetic dictionary to automatically estimate the phonetic complexity index of a set of words in French: iPhocomp. We compare the human computation of this index with the automatic computation provided by iPhocomp in order to estimate the performance of the interface.L'indice de complexité phonétique a été proposé par Jakielski afin d'estimer la difficulté à prononcer certains mots en anglais. Des études comparatives sur plusieurs types de pathologies du langage, dans des langues diverses, ont permis d'observer des comportements différents parmi les sujets étudiés, face à des mots d'indices de complexité phonétique variés. Nous proposons une interface web basée sur un dictionnaire phonétique afin d'estimer automatiquement l'indice de complexité phonétique d'un ensemble de mots en français : iPhocomp. Nous comparons l'étiquetage humain à l'étiquetage automatique fourni par iPhocomp afin d'estimer la performance de l'interface

La phonétique basque

El conocimiento de la fonética de las palabras y su evolución es necesario para realizar el estudio de la etimología. Se dan diversos ejemplos de cambios fonéticos de palabras del euskeraThe knowledge of the phonetics of the words and its evolution is necessary to accomplish the study of the etymology. Various examples of phonetic changes of Basque words are give