Contents
Number 2 2005
- Taive Särg, The Early History of Estonian Speech Prosody Studies
- Abstract. The paper provides an overview of research on
Estonian speech prosody from the 17th century to the beginning of the 19th
century, focusing on the discovery of three levels of word stress and
quantity. The priests of mainly German origin founded Estonian linguistic
tradition. The lexical stress on the first syllable was probably known before
it was first mentioned in the grammar (Stahlen 1637); the existence of
secondary stress was clearly stated by J. J. A. Hirschhausen (1827). Till the
19th century it was difficult to realize that the duration was not a correlate
of stress in Estonian. The Estonians' perception was of utmost importance in
discovering the three quantity degrees, as the (supposed) first recording of
three quantities in vowels ("Agenda Parva" 1622 by unknown author, presumably
of South-Estonian origin) as well as their theoretical description (Masing
1824) were given by native speakers.
- Meelis Mihkla, Jüri Kuusik, Analysis and Modelling of
Temporal Characteristics of Speech for Estonian Text-to-Speech Synthesis
- Abstract. A text-to-speech system must be capable of
generating sounds and pauses with such durations that do not noticeably differ
from natural speech. Currently, the prosodic modelling of Estonian
text-to-speech synthesis is largely based on generalized measurements of
speech units in isolated words and sentences, and as a result the synthesized
speech is often monotonous and has poor fluency. In this work the first
attempts are made to improve the naturalness of the output speech of the
speech synthesiser with the help of statistical duration models of fluent
speech. The source material consisted of (a) prose read out by a professional
actor, and (b) news broadcasts read by announcers. On the basis of this
material variability of the duration of pauses and boundary lengthenings was
investigated. It turns out that in the case of a read text at normal speech
rate the classification of speech pauses is perfectly possible and can be
applied in speech synthesis. An attempt was also made to establish whether and
to what extent the syntactic parsing of a text is related to the prosodic
parsing of speech. A generalized regression analysis revealed what features
are essential in predicting sound durations in speech and a statistically
optimal model was developed. Curiously the quantity degree of a foot, despite
being the cornerstone of Estonian word prosody, was not a significant feature
for prediciting the duration of a sound on the basis of this material. The
results of the modelling were then compared with the expert opinions of some
Estonian phoneticians.
- Karl Pajusalu, Toomas Help, Pärtel Lippus, Ellen
Niit, Pire Teras, Tiit-Rein Viitso, On the Temporal
Structure of Estonian Secondary-Stressed Feet
- Abstract. The article focuses on Estonian words of two and
more feet, comparing the temporal structures of the feet in words of four to
six syllables that consist of short primary- and secondary-stressed syllables.
A phonological introduction to the problem of secondary stress in Estonian is
followed by the treatment of lengthening of vowels in secondary-stressed feet.
The article then analyses duration ratios on the basis of phonetic data. The
pronunciations of the western and eastern peripheries of Estonia — western
Saaremaa and eastern Võrumaa — are compared to follow possible regional
differences in Standard Estonian. It appears that only in Saaremaa the
unstressed vowel in a secondary-stressed foot has generally lengthened, and
the duration ratios of the secondary-stressed foot are similar to that of the
primary-stressed foot. In both areas the temporal structure of feet depends on
the general structure of the prosodic word.
- Eva Liina Asu, Intonational Contour Alignment in Saaremaa and
Standard Estonian
- Abstract. The dialect of Estonian normally singled out as
differing from the standard in its "sing-songy" melody is that of the island
of Saaremaa. The characteristic intonation of this variety is attributed to
historic contacts with Swedish and has been shown to be phonetically
manifested in differences in peak alignment. The present paper extends the
analysis of two previous studies (Asu 2004a; 2005) dealing with tonal
alignment in the Saaremaa variety by concentrating on the study of the nucleus
in declarative read sentences.The nucleus in Standard Estonian is often low
and level, the pattern which in autosegmental-metrical analysis of intonation
is labelled as H+L*. The delay of intonation peaks which implies a rightward
shift in Saaremaa Estonian represents a trend towards lower pitch on the
accented syllable. It is tested here whether this shift to the right precludes
a distinct low accentuation. It appears that this is not the case and that
both intonation patterns are distinct also in the Saaremaa variety. The
finding suggests that the peak delay is a local phenomenon involving specific
pitch events rather than a global displacement of the whole intonation
contour.
- Ellen Niit, Vowels in Initial Syllables in Saaremaa
- Abstract. The article provides an overview of vowel quality
in the initial syllable of words having various degrees of quantity in the
insular dialect of Estonian. The material consists of eight sub-dialects of
Saaremaa. The article presents measurement findings of the formant analysis
and their discussion. The acoustic-phonetic data served as a basis for
establishing the systems of vowels in the sub-dialects of Saaremaa. The
results allowed distinguishing 8 vowels (a, o, u, ä, e, ö, i, ü).
Length affects vowel quality — overlong mid-high monophthongs are raised. The
area under discussion has no unrounded central vowel õ of Standard
Estonian; it has developed into a mid-high rounded front vowel, the quality of
which is close to the short and long ö but not the overlong ö.
The vowels ö and open ö have merged. Only in some words in
western Saaremaa ä has developed into a mid-high short or overlong
monophthong, the quality of which is close to the short and long e but
not the overlong e. The sound ɛ is an allophone of e.
- Sulev Iva, Glottal Stop in Võro South Estonian
- Abstract. One of the most striking characteristics of Võro
South Estonian is the glottal stop ʔ that occurs as a peculiar
consonant phoneme. The present article investigates the occurrence, quality,
and duration of the glottal stop, and the F0 contour of the words with the
glottal stop, in controlled and spontaneous speech from the East-Võro area.
The acoustic analyses have been carried out with the program PRAAT. The
results show that the Võro glottal stop occurs always as a word-final stop
whose duration is similar to that of word-final semi-long consonants. The
glottal stop is pronounced more frequently in certain word and sentence
structures and often gets assimilated with the initial consonant of the
following word. The Võro glottal stop has characteristics triggering both
phonemic and morpho-phonological processes as well as intonational
characteristics. The Võro glottal stop is a phoneme that has certain prosodic
features that are above all used for highlighting grammatical and
communicational meanings.
- Niina Aasmäe, Jaan Ross, How Free is Alternating Stress in
Erzya?
- Abstract. The present paper addresses the subject of the
variability of stress assignment in Erzya. The aim of the analysis reported
here was establishing speaker-, utterance- and word-related data that might
account for the alternation of the initial and non-initial stress patterns.
The material used for the analysis contained spontaneously produced utterances
recorded by 33 speakers of Erzya originating from different areas of the
Mordvin Republic and diaspora. The overall distribution of the stress patterns
in the data of spontaneous speech proved to be more variable than it has been
observed in script reading. The occurrences of initial stress exceeded those
of non-initial stress; however, non-initial stress was used more often than in
reading. The analysis revealed differentiation in the distribution of the
patterns of stress in the idiolect-related data. The tendency towards the
assignment of initial stress was more salient in the data of the idiolects
characterized by the reduction of vowels in non-initial syllables. There was
less difference between initial and non-initial stress occurrences in the data
of the idiolects which use only full-formation vowels. In the dialects that
use reduced vowels, reduction might have been the consequence of the
diminishing mobility of stress. The assignment of stress, as the test material
showed, could not be conditioned by the type of word structure. It is rather
the functional role of the word in an utterance that might be associated with
the mobility of stress. The recurrent responses of the speakers recorded in a
dialogue were found to contribute to the increase of non-initial stress
occurrences.
REVIEWS
- N. S. Aduškina, M. D. Imajkina, K stoletiju so dnja
roždenija N. F. Cyganova (1904—2004)
- Sirkka P a i k k a l a, Se tavallinen Virtanen. Suomalaisen
sukunimikäytännön modernisoituminen 1850-luvulta vuoteen 1921. Suomalaisen
Kirjallisuuden Seura. Helsinki [—Tampere 2004]. Rez. von Marja
Kallasmaa
- Tat'jana T r o j a n o v a, Antropotsentritšeskaja metafora v russkom i
estonskom jazykach (na materiale imen suštšestvitel'nych), Tartu 2003
(Dissertationes Philologicae Slavicae Universitatis Tartuensis 11).
Rets. Pille Eslon
- M. V. Mosin, D. V. Cygankin, Aleksandr Feoktistov (27
avgusta 1928 — 6 sentjabrja 2004)
- E. N. Mustajev, Pamjati Fedora Ivanovitša Gordejeva (1929—2005)
- Auf der Titelseite: Phonetikbücher von Paul Ariste