LIN6902

An Acoustic Phonetic Analysis of the

Vowels of Aba Amdo

Submitted to:Dr. Ian MacKay

Submitted by:Jonathan Lim

5428548

April 30, 2009

1. Introduction

! There are six major Tibetan language families in China: Central, Western Archaic,

Western Innovative, Southern, Kham and Amdo (Nishi 1986). In general, there is no

intelligibility between Amdo speakers and the other major Tibetan language family (Gordon

2005). Aba is a major dialect of the Tibetan Amdo language family. It is mainly spoken in the

Aba county of Aba (Ngawa) Autonomous Prefecture and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in

northwestern Sichuan, China. According to Aba o"cial 2007 censor of web site, there is a

population of 67 thousand, mainly Tibetan living in the county (AAG 2008).

The language resource person (LRP) is a native Aba speaker who grew up in Aba, and

currently lives in Vancouver, BC. Both of his parents are native Aba speaker and still live in

Aba, China. He went to Dharamsala, India at the age of 18 years and #nished his high school

education there, and then he came to Canada, and has lived in Canada for 8 years. He also

speaks $uent Lhasa Tibetan, a central Tibetan languages, which is also lingua franca of the

Tibetan speech community in China and also Diaspora. He also speaks fairly $uent English

with noticeable accent which he acquired since his stay in Canada. He works mainly as a

Tibetan teacher and a language consultant for various #lm projects in the region.

! There is no known acoustic phonetic research being conducted in Aba Amdo. There are

only two major works were conducted in the related language family: Nagano (1980)

dialectology research of Amdo Sherpa1 dialect, and Sun (1986) phonology analyses of Amdo

Ndzogre. Both of them have slightly di%erent vowel inventory from Aba Amdo as shown

below:

(1) Vowel Inventory of various Amdo Tibetan languages:

SherpaNagano (1980)

NdzogreSun (1986)

Aba

i ɨ ɯ ue ø oɛ ɔE ɑ

i ɨ ʉ u e ɤ o ɛ ɔ æ a ɑ

i u e ɘ o ɛ ə ɔ æ ʌ ɑ

This study presents the initial results of the the language documentation of Aba, a dialect of

Tibetan Amdo. The analyses are based on selected words from a 1100 word list. The vowel

inventory of Aba is still pending for further con#rmation with the LRP in the near future. This

study will based on the current version of Aba vowels and focus on the #rst three formants of

these vowels and their patterns. Due to scope of this study, other important aspects of the

vowel such as duration, fundamental frequency, diphthongization are not discussed here.

1 In Sherpa, there is one vowel being transcribed as [E], which is not a IPA symbol. According to Pullum & Ladusaw (1986:51), the capitalization was a convention to represent a voiceless vowel which is [e ̥] in IPA.

2. Method

All recordings were made on an MacBook Pro through a Sound Devices’ USBPre microphone

preamp/USB device with a Sennheiser HMD25-XQ headset, which includes a supercardioid

dynamic microphone. All recording sessions were conducted in the living room of the LRP,

since his resident was around two hours away from my previous university. All the sound #les

were saved as waveform audio #les (.wav), which is uncompressed audio data in the pulse-code

modulation (PCM) format. All recordings were done in mono (i.e., non-stereo) and were

recorded using Praat, with a 44.1 KHz 16 bit sampling rate using the apparatus described

above. The selected sound #les were later downsampled to 11 KHz that they are more suitable

for formant analysis.

! I used a 1700 comparative wordlist from Snider and Roberts (2004), which yield around

1400 words. From the recorded wordlist, I measure the vowels of a open syllables words,

except [ʌ] and [ɘ] which only found at closed syllable words. Ideally, one should also control

the onset of the syllable to minimize consonantal e%ect on the formants, however, due to

limited data this is not possible for this study. All the formants values are averages of various

words with di%erent onset, and for [ʌ] and [ɘ], di%erent coda. Again, because of the limitation

of the data, some vowels had more words and some had less words for the formant analysis.

The selected word and its measurement data can be found in the Appendix A.

! I mainly used PRAAT to do formant measurement. I used standard spectrogram setting

for male speaker, which had a view range from zero to #ve thousand hertz, window length of

0.005s, and a dynamic range of 50 dB. During analysis, I switched on the formant tracking,

then I will click at the region where there are minimal e%ect from formant transition and

relatively in steady state, and then I queried the data by clicking formant listing which provides

measurement of F1 to F5. I recorded only the values of F1, F2 and F3 because they are

relevant to vowel characterization. During this study, I found that PRAAT was less robust to

provide correct formants tracking to the lower back vowels, [o] and [ɔ]. Most of the time,

PRAAT tends to treat these two formants as one, because these two formants were relatively

closed to each other, as pointed out by styluses in the spectrogram of [kɔ] (‘hear’) below:

(1) PRAAT’s spectrogram and formants tracking of [kɔ] (‘hear’)

Time (s)

3.001 3.3770

5000

0134hear0134hear

Fre

quen

cy (

Hz)

Due to this limitation mentioned above, I opted to use Scion’s Macquirer 8.9.5 to remeasure the

formant for [o] and [ɔ] only. In Macquirer, I used the following setting for the spectrogram:

bandwidth of 172 Hz, frequency range of 5000 Hz, dynamic range of 50 dB, and a pre-

emphasis of 0.80. I also used Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) to estimate formants, with a

LPC coe"cient of 14. I was able to obtain F1 and F2 of these vowels correctly and

consistently. Nonetheless, there were few instances that I needed to measure the F3 manually

by clicking on the right formant, because of false prediction of erroneous high F3 values, see

the F3 value in (3). A typical formant tracking and LPC analysis generated by Macquirer on the

same token in wave #le of [ko] (‘hear’) are shown below:

(2) Macquirer’s spectrogram, formants tracking and LPC of [o] of the word [ko] ‘hear’

Fre

qu

ency

(H

z)

Time (s)3.030 3.390

Finally, the formants of the vowels of some selected word were not able be resolved by the

speech analysis software or by manual measurement, these data were omitted.

Sample Rate (Hz) 11025Bandwidth (Hz) 172Window length (pts) 64

LPC Coefficient 14Applied Window (ms) 5Average Step Size (ms) 10

Formants Bandwidths 489.0 160.0 742.0 116.03597.0 106.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

3. Formants of Aba Vowels

To provide an overview of formants of Aba’s vowels, I have chosen vowel segments with a

voiceless velar stop onset [kV/kʰV], except [ɘ] and [ʌ] which have a coda [Vk] and [kVp],

respectively. These vowel segments were assembled into a spectrogram with formant tracking

as shown below:

(3) A spectrogram of a set of Aba vowels

!ei æ " # $ u o %&

In general, all the vowels’ formants were obtained from PRAAT, with the exception of [o] and

[ɔ] which I used Macquirer LPC method as discussed in previous section. The preliminary

formants measurement of Aba vowels (AVs) and its English vowels (EVs)2 counterpart are

presented below:

2 The English vowels data are the mean data for male English from various studies which are compiled by Mackay (2009)

(4) Comparisons of Aba (rounded to the nearest 50Hz) and English vowel formants values AVs F1 F2 F3 EVs F1 F2 F3[i] 300 2250 3000 [i] 294 2275 2964[e] 400 2100 2800 [e] 449 2077 2672[ɛ] 500 1950 2600 [ɛ] 544 1773 2528[æ] 700 1800 2600 [æ] 654 1731 2456[ɘ] 400 1800 2400 - - - -[ə] 500 1400 2450 - - - -[ɑ] 700 1500 2500 [ɑ] 712 1153 2448[ʌ] 700 1400 2400 [ʌ] 604 1266 2466[u] 350 1000 2300 [u] 333 1190 2306[o] 450 850 2450 [o] 472 1100 2393[ɔ] 400 750 2450 [ɔ] 672 1018 2464

The schematic representation of F1, F2, and F3 of Aba vowels can be found in Appendix B.

The formants data of [ə] and [ɘ] is not available in English so they are not includedin the

comparison. On one hand, some of the vowel formants value of Aba were closely resemble to

the value of English vowels, such as [i], [e], [ɛ], [æ], and [u]. On the other hand, most formant

values of back vowels were di%erent from the English vowels. The F2 of vowel [ɑ] of Aba is

400 Hz higher than its English counterpart, which suggested that it is situated more forefront,

probably more resemble [ɐ], the central near open vowel. The F2 of [o] and [ɔ] of Aba is

around 300 Hz lower, probably in Aba the mid back vowel tends to be further back than the

English counterpart. Furthermore, the F1 of the [ɔ] of Aba is also signi#cantly lower, and this

suggests it tends to have a higher vowels height.

! I also like to point out that one vowel that I found in Aba, that is currently represented by

[ɘ], a central close-mid unrounded vowel, it has an average formants values of 400Hz, 1800 Hz,

and 2400 Hz, respectively. As I discussed in the introduction, where in the related languages,

there are a few potential candidate in this vowel space, i.e. [ɨ, ɯ, ʉ , ø , ɤ ], but no linguists

proposed [ɘ]. There are few reasons that make [ɘ] a viable candidate. First, based on value of

F1 its is not as high as [i] or [u] as shown in the F1 and F2, and F1 and F3 plot below:

(5) Plot of F1 & F2, and F1 & F3 of Aba vowels.

800

700

600

500

400

300

200

30002500 2000 1500 1000 500

.

.

.

.

.

.

..

.

.

.

!

e

i

æ

"

#

$

u

o

%

&

F1

(H

z)

F2 (Hz)

800

700

600

500

400

300

200

3000 2800 2600 2400 2200

.

.

.

.

.

.

..

.

.

.

i

u

!"æ

#$

e

%

o&

F1 (

Hz)

F3 (Hz)

The F1 value of 400Hz discouraged me to consider this vowel is situated at the close position

such as [ɨ, ɯ, ʉ]. Then, if one looked at the F2 value of 1800Hz, it is quite forefront, that make

[ɯ, ɤ] unlikely. Then the only candidate left is [ø], a front close mid rounded vowel

and the F3 value of 2400 Hz seems to suggest this also. Nonetheless, I have observed

during elicitation and a video clip of the speech production of this particular vowel,

there are no evidence of lip rounding as shown in the photo below:

(6) The position of the lips during the vowel [ɘ] in the word [tɘk] ‘six’

Having said that, F3 is still an important acoustic cue to di%erentiate [ɘ] from [ə], as

seen in the plot of F1 and F3 above. That the [ə] and [ɘ] are further apart in F1 and F3

plot, that the hearer will perceive them di%erently. In short, I will use [ɘ] until I have

more evidences suggest it is otherwise.

4. Conclusions

This study has provided an preliminary acoustics phonetic analysis of the vowels of Aba,

namely, the #rst three formants of these vowels. Although these formants measurement are

based from a single native Aba speaker, the formants values of most vowels parallel to the

#ndings of English vowel. There are also vowels formant values are signi#cant di%erent from

English. These di%erences need to be further investigated in future study. Hence, the reseacher

will need more native speaker of both gender are needed in order to characterizing the vowel

better. Hopefully, with more data and investigation I will be able to #nalize the vowels

inventory and continue to discover other important characteristics of Aba vowels system.

Appendix A

File segment Gloss V F1_1 F2_1 F3_1 F1_2 F2_2 F3_2 F1_3 F2_3 F3_3 F1_M F2_M F3_M

538 ʃomiː dress (v) i 256 2157 2964 289 2122 2960 290 2179 2999 278 2153 2974

255 ʃi know i 262 2102 3006 300 2131 2843 303 2190 2932 288 2141 2927

757 niː harvest (maize) (v) i 282 2335 3121 316 2336 2983 338 2355 3186 312 2342 3097

1236 ndiː rice i 280 2427 3093 298 2383 3079 302 2156 2832 293 2322 3001

1414 əɾiː roll i 309 2169 2853 323 2236 2793 311 2278 2830 314 2228 2825

278 hali startle, surprise i 283 2157 2827 275 2248 2941 275 2125 2809 278 2177 2859

692 ɾki ladder i 345 2294 3092 308 2192 2919 309 2292 3016 321 2259 3009

950 semdɨŋiː mourning i 264 2391 3116 271 2367 3099 - - - 268 2379 3108

1305 meː 're e 439 2196 2877 452 2142 2816 468 2002 2631 453 2113 2775

1394 teː point (n) e 464 2152 2734 512 1995 2598 445 2087 2779 474 2078 2704

908 ndeː demon, evil spirit e 429 2031 2605 457 1983 2615 444 1982 3434 443 1999 2885

350 ane mother's sister (aunt) e 390 2247 2638 369 2197 2662 405 2150 2629 388 2198 2643

577 ʃe (our e 402 2060 2903 398 2040 2796 390 1990 2769 397 2030 2823

1657 tʌkɲe near e 401 2177 2788 457 2137 2746 424 2156 2712 427 2157 2749

1341 məgeː drought, famine e 344 2121 2817 394 2084 2757 347 2114 2975 362 2106 2850

23 ɾke e 426 2120 2873 424 2138 2793 479 2126 2644 443 2128 2770

1655 tɛː there ɛ 539 1802 2548 496 2003 2658 476 1913 2552 504 1906 2586

17 tselɛ tongue ɛ 528 1980 2671 520 1965 2708 505 1935 2589 518 1960 2656

1699 a rɛː yes ɛ 470 1971 2641 448 1976 2683 482 1955 2548 467 1967 2624

15 kʰæ mouth æ 717 1828 2463 705 1714 2335 752 1759 2517 725 1767 2438

1290 ɾdoŋkæ spring æ 681 1716 2790 643 1820 2905 691 1719 2420 672 1752 2705

1118 mbəː (ea ə 499 1187 2412 502 1248 2449 509 1227 2582 503 1221 2481

29 ɸə hair (of body) ə 554 1099 2427 554 1238 2342 572 1262 2353 560 1200 2374

1680 təː that (man) ə 510 1305 2947 527 1443 2671 533 1256 2784 523 1335 2801

1654 ndəː here ə 495 1351 2668 520 1390 2478 579 1450 2513 531 1397 2553

249 ʃə die ə 489 1415 2043 468 1662 2515 438 1823 2650 465 1633 2403

1262 ɾəː mountain ə 553 1469 2349 559 1443 2224 542 1419 2437 551 1444 2337

File segment Gloss V F1_1 F2_1 F3_1 F1_2 F2_2 F3_2 F1_3 F2_3 F3_3 F1_M F2_M F3_M

879 ələ song ə 511 1336 2430 527 1376 2433 535 1477 2770 524 1396 2544

272 ŋə cry, weep ə 467 1393 2311 440 1414 2466 497 1480 2429 468 1429 2402

1598 hgə nine (9) ə 480 1462 2377 487 1499 2375 487 1533 2227 485 1498 2326

517 hkəmakə steal ə 433 1373 2195 442 1397 2200 451 1379 2122 442 1383 2172

1514 raŋtsɘk lengthen ɘ 499 1706 2536 507 1693 2550 511 1704 2547 506 1701 2544

1595 tɘk six (6) ɘ 439 1880 2321 496 1760 2275 499 1716 2227 478 1785 2274

431 tsɘk word ɘ 370 1747 2457 351 1787 2533 341 1980 2371 354 1838 2454

1645 dɘk gather ɘ 341 1845 2373 358 1935 2656 389 1935 2421 363 1905 2483

92 ɘk breath ɘ 419 1641 2346 399 1788 2421 435 1610 2242 418 1680 2336

1452 hɘk pierce ɘ 399 1649 2338 447 1681 2457 436 1741 2299 427 1690 2365

33 daŋkʰa chest a 694 1665 2223 678 1621 2262 691 1615 2327 688 1634 2271

222 ʰma scar a 695 1653 3113 686 1426 2822 702 1420 3028 694 1500 2988

526 həniɸa dwell, inhabit a 633 1641 2337 599 1542 2674 573 1458 2491 602 1547 2501

197 humba deaf (mute) person a 711 1426 2462 682 1346 2275 692 1313 2202 695 1362 2313

81 lepa brain a 777 1629 2202 701 1459 2178 746 1561 2227 741 1550 2202

133 ʰta look at, watch a 801 1545 2527 737 1488 2597 723 1510 2388 754 1514 2504

777 daː chase (v) a 717 1247 2455 707 1269 2345 746 1227 2590 723 1248 2463

165 lakda wave (hand as a greeting) a 715 1539 2677 656 1499 2581 688 1415 2664 686 1484 2641

460 na swear a 698 1569 2598 654 1577 2665 706 1448 2642 686 1531 2635

1261 saː ground, land a 758 1548 2401 717 1566 - 678 1441 2248 718 1518 2325

676 aɾaː fence (n) a 742 1306 2421 807 1316 2251 737 1314 2289 762 1312 2320

731 laː weave a 761 1482 2649 715 1434 2311 727 1404 2561 734 1440 2507

497 ka order (someone...) a 725 1774 2470 685 1711 2393 699 1749 2525 703 1745 2463

1648 ŋa I a 743 1802 2519 696 1725 2434 682 1785 2688 707 1771 2547

208 dʌk heal ʌ 669 1438 2508 662 1482 2418 669 1530 2556 667 1483 2494

322 kʌp obstruct ʌ 708 1494 2030 733 1265 2181 744 1387 2048 728 1382 2086

433 lʌp say ʌ 670 1292 2577 670 1283 2476 621 1256 2328 654 1277 2460

485 ʰrʌk caress (v) ʌ 691 1369 2083 562 1269 2151 669 1444 2350 641 1361 2195

522 nʌk (be) guilty ʌ 732 1296 2547 697 1279 2561 719 1315 2656 716 1297 2588

767 tuː domesticate, tame u 256 975 2357 311 869 2434 373 989 2222 313 944 2338

1275 rəduː dust u 373 1067 2319 315 1028 2242 354 1009 2203 347 1035 2255

562 ɾku apply u 350 1006 2178 330 1006 2317 350 986 2277 343 999 2257

817 ɾguː money u 330 966 2297 370 986 2237 330 946 2376 343 966 2303

421 tɾu (ee, run away from u 324 1092 2328 311 1098 2297 330 1085 2197 322 1092 2274

202 ɲalu stupid person u 357 1072 2255 292 984 2259 350 1066 2277 333 1041 2264

904 toː tobacco o 452 843 2549 499 900 2514 492 953 2595 481 899 2553

1369 loː year o 453 761 2643 415 849 2669 452 806 2560 440 805 2624

134 ko hear o 451 746 2341 449 850 2250 451 790 2394 450 795 2328

File segment Gloss V F1_1 F2_1 F3_1 F1_2 F2_2 F3_2 F1_3 F2_3 F3_3 F1_M F2_M F3_M

573 kʰoː soup, broth o 430 830 2410 481 821 2099 465 873 2129 459 841 2213

604 ɾŋɔː roast ɔ 341 828 2372 326 803 2298 295 896 2328 321 842 2333

901 ɾtsemɔː game ɔ 351 804 2454 365 839 2422 366 772 2384 361 805 2420

1293 tsaŋpɔː river ɔ 402 738 2750 358 706 2356 426 800 2586 395 748 2564

659 tambɔː (be) tight ɔ 419 755 2780 370 775 2662 363 754 2447 384 761 2630

1 luɸɔ body ɔ 373 741 2627 382 745 2755 391 764 2472 382 750 2618

883 dɔː dance (n) ɔ 413 743 2371 408 656 2281 402 738 2296 408 712 2316

1650 kʰɔː he (human) ɔ 401 693 2416 413 571 2447 440 753 2518 418 672 2460

665 ɾgɔː door, doorway cover ɔ 389 741 2470 399 693 2265 377 799 2160 388 744 2298

953 ɾɔː corpse ɔ 375 829 2356 404 756 2356 435 859 2435 405 815 2382

Appendix B

F1, F2 and F3 of Aba vowels

3500

3000

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500

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!ei æ " # $ u o %&

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

Fre

quency (

Hz)

Vowels

30003500

References

AAG, Aba autonomous government. 2009. A Ba Xian (Aba county). Aba autonomous government 2008 [cited Apr 11 2009]. Available from http://www.abazhou.gov.cn/gxzc/gxzc-ab-xqgk.html.

Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.). 2005. Tibetan, amdo. 15 ed. Vol. 2006, Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Dallas, TX: SIL International.

MacKay, Ian. 2009. Speech Acoustics. Ottawa.[Manuscript]

Nishi, Yoshio. 1986. Gendai Chibetto-go hogen-no bunrai ( a classification of Tibetan dialects). Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology (11):837-901.

Nagano, Yasuhiko. 1980. Amdo Sherpa Dialect: a Material for Tibetan Dialectology. Monumenta Serindica 7.

Pullum, Geoffrey K., and William A. Ladusaw. 1996. Phonetic symbol guide. 2nd [updated] ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sun, Jackson. 1986. Aspect of the Phonology of Amdo tibetan: Ndzorge Sa me Xi ra Dialect. Monumenta Serindica 16.