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Impressions of Stressed Vowels

The first ten stressed tokens of each vowel in Juba's data were transcribed impressionistically, to give an idea of the allophonic range of the vowel in stressed environments. The range of transcriptions are as follows:

/ii or i:/ [i, i:, Ii, I:] /i/ [I, I, I, i, I, I:]
/ie or e:/ [i, i, i, i, i:, e: I:] /e/ [, I, ]
/aa or a:/ [:, , ::] /a/ [, , , ]
/uo or o:/ [u, U] /o/ [o, o, o, U]
/uu or u:/ [u:, Uu, u, uw, ] /u/ [u, U]
/ai/ [, I, a] /ou/ [U, u, oU, oU, oo]
/ir/ [, i, , i, , , , ] /ur/ , u, o, u, ]
/ar/ [a] // [:, , ]

Note that the long ``mid'' vowels are never as low as mid when stressed. The long vowels surface as monophthongs more than in RA. The long-short distinction is much more important on the phonetic surface; the phonetic glides which are intrinsic to the underlyingly long vowels in RA occur less commonly in JC: monophthongs are quite common on the surface for the long vowels /ii, aa, uu/. Here phonetic length and quality rather than phonetic gliding is the key to the distinction between the long and short vowels. These differences are explored instrumentally in studies of vowel duration and of the phonetic quality of the vowel nuclei.


next up previous
Next: Acoustic Correlates of Phonological Up: Jamaican Creole Previous: The Shape of Formant
Thomas Veatch 2005-01-25