Affricated allophones of North Welsh /t/: an acoustic analysis
Welsh is a p-Celtic language spoken mostly in the British Isles. Its consonant inventory features six plosive phonemes, i.e. /p, t, k, b, d, g/. The Welsh plosives exhibit a contrast between the fortis and lenis series marked phonetically by a number of phonetic features, the most important of t...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2023
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/22678/1/Gema_23_3_6.pdf http://journalarticle.ukm.my/22678/ https://ejournal.ukm.my/gema/issue/view/1615 |
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| Summary: | Welsh is a p-Celtic language spoken mostly in the British Isles. Its consonant inventory features
six plosive phonemes, i.e. /p, t, k, b, d, g/. The Welsh plosives exhibit a contrast between the fortis
and lenis series marked phonetically by a number of phonetic features, the most important of them
being aspiration. A previous study on Welsh plosives conducted by the authors of this paper
revealed that, unlike the other plosives, the Welsh /t/ has a strong tendency towards affrication in
some contexts. Since affrication of plosives has received some attention in phonetic studies on
other languages, it seemed striking that potential affrication of Welsh plosives has not yet been
studied phonetically. The present study includes word-initial and word-final realisations of /t/ in
Welsh monosyllabic lexemes. The analysis of four key spectral moments; namely, centre of
gravity, dispersion, skewness and kurtosis, was conducted to confirm the assumptions regarding
allophonic variation of the Welsh /t/ based on a visual inspection of spectrograms. The results
suggest that the Welsh /t/ may actually have as many as four allophones, i.e. the aspirated
allophone [th ], the affricated allophone [ts], which can also be aspirated in two different ways;
namely, aspiration can occur simultaneously with affrication [t sh] or it can follow the affricated
section [tsh ]. |
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