An Acoustic Phonetic Analysis of Three Tonally Contrastive Grammatical Moods in Anyi: Orthographic Implications - A Festschrift in Honor of Rev. Dr. Gilbert Ansre

It is an honor to write this paper for Dr. Gilbert Ansre’s festschrift. He was my mentor when I was doing my Ph.D. in linguistics. In the summers, the United Bible Societies would send me to study under him as a translation-consultant in training. He challenged me and coached me in applying theoretical linguistics concepts to real life language problems. When I received my Ph.D. and joined him in Togo, West Africa, he congratulated me saying, “Now, you are going to do real linguistics. This was an absurd statement at first, but over the years, I keep discovering its wisdom. The mentoring that Dr. Ansre provided helped me to improve on the existing orthographies of the languages under my supervision. The lack of tone marking in these languages made the reading of the Holy Scriptures a herculean task, even for the translators themselves. The quest for solutions led me to pioneer an orthographic approach to tone marking known as Tone Optimality Model (Koffi 2012:230-232). It is deeply anchored in acoustic phonetics and influenced by Dr. Ansre’s view that orthographies need not be overcrowded with superfluous diacritic marks. The model that I came up with marks tones systematically, yet sparingly. This paper describes and exemplifies how the same model was used to transcribe three tonally contrastive moods in the New Testament of Anyi Morofu, an Akan language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire. This festschrift is a fitting tribute to Dr. Gilbert Ansre whose book, Tonal Structure of Ewe (1961), is highly regarded for its seminal contribution to contemporary understanding of the tonal structure of West African languages

A Social Network Analysis of Nepali Students at a US University

Individuals in a community interact with others in small and large social groupings. Such interactions provide a wealth of information that can be exploited in multiple ways. In this paper, we investigate the social networks of Nepali students at St. Cloud State University, a comprehensive university in central Minnesota, USA. The participants are 10 males and 9 females. Their responses to survey/interview questions serve as the basis for this research. The aggregated data show that Nepali students have 76 “best friends” in their social networks, and that 45 of those are Nepali, 31 are international students from 12 different countries, and 11 are domestic (American) students. The data also show that Nepali students spent 611 hours a week with the people in their social networks, including 411 hours with other Nepalis, 139 hours with international students, and 61 hours with domestic students. These social networks and the interactional patterns discussed in this paper (and in a companion paper in this volume) contain important insights for both university staff and Nepali students

THE ACOUSTIC PHONETIC PROPERTIES OF SINGLY AND DOUBLY ARTICULATED STOPS IN ANYI: A DATA-DRIVEN ANALYSIS

This paper examines the acoustic phonetic properties of the stop consonants [p, b, t, d, k, g, k͡p, g͡b] in Anyi, an Akan language spoken in eastern Côte d’Ivoire and western Ghana. Twelve acoustic correlates (F0, F1, F2, F3, F4, VOT, intensity, duration, B1, B2, B3, and B4) are extracted from data elicited from 10 participants in order to determine which correlates are robust for speech intelligibility. The findings discussed in the paper are based on 2,880 tokens (10 speakers x 8 words x 3 repetitions x 12 correlates). The investigation serves two purposes. The first is to give an exhaustive account of stops in Anyi. The second is to prepare the language for formant-based text-to-speech synthesis. Tried and true Just Noticeable Difference (JND) thresholds are used to gauge which correlates are robust and which ones are not

Paradigm Shift in Language Planning and Policy: Game Theoretic Solutions -- My Response to Dr. Sayers\u27 Review

Ettien Koffi\u27s response to Dr. Dave Sayers review of Dr. Koffi\u27s Paradigm Shift in Language Planning and Policy (2012) that appeared on The Linguist List

INFANT CRY ANNOYANCE SCALE AND INDEXES

Noise-induced annoyance methodology is applied to infant cry to gauge which of the three acoustic determinants of cries frequency in Hz, intensity in dBA, and duration in hours, minutes, or milliseconds is/are the most annoying to parents and caregivers. The main finding is that in cries, as in many other annoying noises, intensity in dBA is the most aversive correlate. The path leading to this finding is not linear, but rather a tortuous one because many issues and definitions had to be discussed first. In so doing, the smallest unit of a cry had to be established. This led subsequently to the discussions of cycles of cries, cry bouts, cry bioacoustics, noise, annoyance scale, and more. The cries that trigger Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) and Abusive Head Trauma (AHT) are described impressionistically by Barr (2014) as those modified by seven adjectives, namely “prolonged, hard-to-soothe, unpredictable, unexplained, uncontrollable, alarming, and inconsolable cries.” These impressionistic labels are translated into measurable intensity indexes on a four-point annoyance scale. Future technological and practical mitigation solutions that can help reduce incidences of SBS and AHT are discussed

The Duration of [o] in Central Minnesota English: An Acoustic Phonetic Investigation

In this paper, I investigate the durational characteristics of vowels produced by Central Minnesota speakers of English. The vowel [o] receives the lion’s share of attention because it is stereotypically indexed with the Minnesotan way of speaking. Twenty-three female and 11 male talkers produced the 11 phonemic monophthong vowels of English contained in the words . Eleven male talkers (64%) elongate their [o]s, while 10 female talkers (44%) do the same. Overall, the lengthening of [o] marks the speaker as having a stereotypical Minnesota accent, as portrayed in the movie Fargo and the sitcom Coach. The aggregated data suggests that female speakers are making a concerted effort to reduce the duration of their [o]s, but their male counterparts are less inclined to do so. The female linguistic behavior is probably due to the fact that the elongated [o] is perceived as less prestigious. This finding is consistent with sociolinguistic observations from numerous languages indicating that female talkers gravitate toward speech forms that they perceive as more prestigious

A Comprehensive Review of Intensity and Its Linguistic Applications

Every speech sound that human beings produce or perceive is a composite of three independent, yet interdependent correlates, i.e., F0/pitch, intensity, and duration. Koffi (2019) provided a comprehensive review of F0 and its various correlations. In this paper, the focus is on intensity and its linguistic applications. Various terms related to intensity are first examined and explained. Thereafter, its psychoacoustic properties are highlighted and discussed from the standpoint of the Critical Band Theory (CBT) and Just Noticeable Difference (JND) thresholds. Intensity measurements from 55 speakers of Central Minnesota English (CMNE) are used to illustrate the aforementioned concepts. Later in the paper, Equation 4 is used to derive sonority indices that are firmly grounded in the physics of speech. It is argued that these indices are better suited to account for the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) and the Minimal Sonority Distance Parameter (MSDP) than the arbitrary sonority indices commonly used in phonological analyses