Devoicing or strengthening of long obstruents in Greenlandic

It is a characteristic feature of Modern West Greenlandic that long nonnasal consonants are voiceless, whereas these have short voiced counterparts in the case of continuants. Seen in isolation this distribution is suggestive of spontaneous devoicing of long obstruents, but on the basis of evidence from dialects and from old spellings it is suggested that there may be an old "strengthening" process (segmentalization) underlying this modern feature of voicelessness

An appraisal of research in the phonetics and phonology of Thai

Since the Second World War there has been a considerable amount of research activity within Thai phonetics and phonology, first by foreign scholars but more recently also by Thai linguists and phoneticians. Thai being a language that plays a central role in connection with such theoretical issues as manner distinctions within stop consonants (VOT, etc.), or inherent pitch and tonogenesis, it was found expedient to take stock of the overall activity in this field. The present paper attempts to combine a survey of the field with some comments on controversial or neglected issues. The emphasis in this presentation is on descriptive and diachronic/comparative studies; work on speech disturbances, language acquisition, or language teaching is mentioned only occasionally

Instrumentation for Vowel Synthesis

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Morpheme Stress in Danish

No abstrac

What language do "the spirits of the yellow leaves" speak?: A case of conflicting lexical and phonological evidence

This paper (which in part summarizes two papers to appear in Acta Orientalia but which presents separate information as well) deals with some issues raised by descriptive and comparative linguistic work in northern Thailand. The putative Austroasiatic languages "Yumbri" and "Mrabri" (more correctly: Mlabri) have been assigned to "Khmuic" within the Mon-Khmer languages, but the relationship between these two idioms has been a controversial issue. On the basis of recent fieldwork all existing data on "Yumbri" and "Mrabri" can be shown to reflect one and the same language Mlabri in spite of wide discrepancies in notation; these do not even reveal major phonological dialect differences whereas there are conspicuously different lexical usages. This has not so far been properly understood because of difficulties in the interpretation of earlier data which were all gathered by amateurs. - As for the tentative genetic classification of Mlabri as Khmuic, the lexical evidence used to substantiate this claim now turns out to be controversial: a large number of the Khmuic words in Mlabri are rather direct reflexes of en early stage of Tin, a language that has been assigned to the Khmuic branch of Mon-Khmer. Thus, it is either the case that Mlabri and Tin are sister-languages (forming a "Tinic" branch of Khmuic) or that Mlabri has early borrowings from Tin

A Comment on Lexical Insertion

No abstrac

Linguistics, phonetics, and field-work

The present, rather loosely structured and causerielike paper is an attempt to summarize some of the reflections, expectations, and frustrations which have marred the author during several years of pendling between instrumental phonetics and theoretical and descriptive linguistics, and during many years of practical field-work. The main emphasis is on the - possibly futile - question: is field-work data likely ever to be of any interest to instrumental phonetics, or vice-versa? No attempt is made to deal systematically with general methodological aspects of field-work (for this reason also, references to the literature on field-work techniques are totally omitted). Moreover, what is said below about conditions to be met in connection with instrumental analysis, will be trivial to most readers. Nevertheless, it may be worth while spelling out what it is that causes field-work activities and instrumental phonetic research to exhibit little or no mutual interaction in contemporary language study.&nbsp

Fieldwork on the Mlabri language: A preliminary sketch of its phonetics

The present report deals with the phonetics of the Mlabri ("Mrabri") language spoken by a small hill tribe in Northern Thailand. This informal sketch gives an impressionistic phonetic survey of the vowel and consonant systems; more definitive analyses of this and other aspects of the language will be worked out later by the research group, viz. Professor Søren Egerod, Professor Therapan L. Thongkum, and the present author

Can phonological descriptions be made more realistic?

This is an informal presentation of some reflections on current phonological theory, with special reference to notions such as "psychological reality", "productivity", and "naturalness"

On unit accentuation in Danish - and the distinction between deep and surface phonology

This paper outlines a hierarchical model of stress in Danish with special emphasis on phrasal accentuation. The model is essentially based on impressionistic data and phonological and syntactico-semantic analysis of data representing the author's own usage. The relationship between prosody and syntax is explored, and it is suggested that there is an abstract prosodic structure which is very directly coupled to syntax, whereas this is not true of the hierarchical structure found in surface phonology. A considerable shrinkage of structure from deep phonology to (low distinctness levels of) surface phonology is assumed as part of the overall model