Q: speech synthesis and historical phonology

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Fri, 4 Dec 1998, Alice Faber wrote:


> The short version is that the results are not unambiguous and that,
> as Labov and others have shown, native speaker intuitions about
> whether they pronounce two words differently or not aren't always
> reliable. I'd love to see some instrumental data from Basque
> dialects in which the putative fricative merger took place; in my
> view, that's the most reliable way of knowing for sure that there
> was in fact a merger. Of course, the fact that the relevant dialect
> might have been spoken several hundred years ago would make that
> somewhat difficult, alas.

Yes, there is no possibility of obtaining any data from the Gipuzkoan of
several centuries ago, beyond what was written down.

In the south of Gipuzkoa, there is a region in which the historical /j/
has merged with <x>.  Unfortunately, I know of no instrumental work on
this variety.  Observers of varying backgrounds have consistently
reported the merger here.  I myself used to know a native speaker of
this variety, and he insisted that there was no difference for him
between the two historically different segments, nor could I detect a
difference myself in his speech.  This is not ironclad proof, but it's
all we've got.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk