Q: speech synthesis and historical phonology

[Alice Faber]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal

> Alice Faber <faber at haskins.yale.edu> wrote:

> >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.
>
> Not at all.  One would merely have to change the destination of the
> field trip from, say, gorgeous Donostia [San Sebastian] (occasional
> strolls along the Concha beach, zuritos and tapas in the Old Town in
> between collecting instrumental data), to the no less gorgeous
> Pyrinees just north of Iruinea [Pamplona] (July/August, when the
> villages tend to have their Fiesta Mayor would do nicely).  They
> merge /x/ and /j/ there.

Of course it might be easier to get the funding for such a field trip in a
less attractive time of year. All kidding aside, I'm not likely to get to
Spain in the immediate future, but I do have access to excellent acoustic
analysis software (and I know what to do with it), so if anyone else can
record an appropriate data set, let's talk about it.

> [I'm sorry, but it's cold in Amsterdam]

65 F and getting warmer here in Connecticut. (Sorry for gloating...we'll
probably have 3 feet of snow in March).

Alice Faber