The North Wind versus a Wolf: short texts for the description and measurement of English pronunciation

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Deterding
Keyword(s):  
English Speakers ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Acoustic Measurements ◽  
British English ◽  
The North ◽  
North Wind ◽  
English Pronunciation

For many years, the passage ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ (NWS) has been used for phonetic research into different languages. However, there are many shortcomings with the passage for the description of varieties of English, including the absence of some sounds, such as /[zcy ]/ and syllable-initial /θ/, problems with the text for the measurement of rhythm, and issues regarding acoustic measurements of /æ/ and /I/. An alternative passage, ‘The Boy who Cried Wolf’, is suggested, and measurements of the monophthongs based on recordings of the Wolf passage by three RP British English speakers are compared with similar measurements of the vowels in the NWS passage.

Assessing the temporal reliability of rhythm metrics

2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachael-Anne Knight
Keyword(s):  
Current Paper ◽  
Empirical Measure ◽  
The Sun ◽  
British English ◽  
The North ◽  
North Wind ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Current Popularity ◽  
Temporal Reliability

Despite the current popularity of rhythm metrics, there has been relatively little work aimed at establishing their validity or reliability, important characteristics of any empirical measure. The current paper focuses on the stability, or temporal reliability, of rhythm metrics by establishing if they give consistent results for the same speakers, in the same task, on successive occasions. Four speakers of Southern British English were recorded reading ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ (NWS) passage on three consecutive days. Results indicated that some measures correlate more highly across time than others, and the choice of a measure that is both reliable and valid is discussed. It is suggested that the metric that best fits these criteria is formulated in terms of the proportion of vowels within an utterance (%V).

The vowels of Brunei English

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salbrina Sharbawi
Keyword(s):  
Rate Of Change ◽  
The Sun ◽  
British English ◽  
Common Features ◽  
The North ◽  
North Wind

This paper provides an acoustic description of the vowels of Brunei English (BrunE). Ten female BrunE speakers were recorded reading The North Wind and the Sun (NWS) passage. The formant values of the eleven monophthong vowels and the rate of change (ROC) of the diphthong /eI/ were measured and compared with the data of seven British English (BrE) speakers and also the results of similar studies on Singapore English (SgE). It was found that BrunE shares some common features with SgE as both groups do not distinguish between /i˜/ and /I/, /e/ and /æ/, and /f˜/ and /#/. The high back vowels of BrunE, however, are unlike the SgE vowels. Whereas in SgE /u˜/ and /~/ are fully back, in BrunE these two vowels are fronted, so they are similar to the vowels of the BrE speakers. The data also shows that BrunE /f˜/ is more open and less back than BrE /f˜/. For /eI/, the average ROC for Bruneian speakers is considerably less negative than that for British speakers, which indicates that in BrunE, just as in SgE, this vowel is less diphthongal than its counterpart in BrE.

scholarly journals Tausug (Suluk)

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Soderberg ◽  
Seymour A. Ashley ◽  
Kenneth S. Olson
Keyword(s):  
The Philippines ◽  
Population Estimate ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Southwestern Part ◽  
Austronesian Language ◽  
The North ◽  
North Wind ◽  
Audio Recordings ◽  
Language Area ◽  
Year 2000

Tausug (ISO code tsg) is an Austronesian language spoken on the island of Jolo in the southwestern Philippines. It is also found on other nearby islands in the southwestern part of the Philippines and in parts of Sabah, Malaysia, where it is called Suluk. The population of the Tausug in the Philippines is estimated at 900,000 (Gordon 2005) and the year 2000 population estimate of the Suluk in Sabah, Malaysia, is 150,000. The following description is based on the variety spoken on Jolo. ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ text was translated from English into Tausug by Irene Hassan. Previous studies of Tausug phonology include Asmah (1978, 1983) and Hassan, Ashley & Ashley (1994). David Lao, age 62 at the time of the recording, born in Jolo, Philippines, was the reader for the Tausug words in this article. Due to difficult access into the language area, all audio recordings were obtained by Skype transmission.

Something about the perception of rhythm

1986 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-47
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Uldall
Keyword(s):  
Broad Band ◽  
Word Boundary ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The North ◽  
North Wind

In 1972 (Uldall (1972)) I measured the durations of all the two-syllable rhythmic feet in Professor David Abercrombie's reading of ‘The North Wind and the Sun’, to see how they fitted his three types of two-syllable feet (Abercrombie (1964)), A short-long, B equal-equal, and C long-short (with a word-boundary between the syllables). I measured all the segments in the words, on broad band spectrograms. The text had been marked for stress by Professor Abercrombie while listening to the tape.

The Black Kenyan English vowel system

2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Hoffmann
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The North ◽  
English Reading ◽  
Language Variety ◽  
North Wind ◽  
The World

While acoustic phonetic studies have been carried out on all types of Englishes around the world, the second language variety spoken in Kenya has so far not been investigated acoustically. The present paper closes this gap by presenting an acoustic phonetic analysis of acrolectal Kenyan English. The data presented here consist of nine male speakers of acrolectal Kenyan English reading the “The North Wind and the Sun”-passage and were analysed using PRAAT (Boersma 2001; Boersma and Weenink 2008). As I will show, a careful visual and statistical analysis of the data unearthes several features of the Kenyan English vowel system that so far have gone unnoticed (e.g. a trend towards a seven vowel system with two front and two back mid vowels). Furthermore I will argue that some of these features can be traced back to the local L1 feature pool.

Is the Portuguese version of the passage ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ phonetically balanced?

2015 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis M. T. Jesus ◽  
Ana Rita S. Valente ◽  
Andreia Hall
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Practice ◽  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Speech Sounds ◽  
Frequency Data ◽  
Portuguese Version ◽  
The North ◽  
European Portuguese ◽  
North Wind ◽  
Manner Of Articulation

There is no standard phonetically balanced short passage for Portuguese research and clinical practice. This paper presents results of a novel analysis of ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ (NWS) passage that aims to determine if it is phonetically balanced for European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP), based on new transcriptions resulting from algorithms developed for grapheme–phone transcription in these two varieties of Portuguese. These algorithms (based on standard EP and São Paulo BP varieties) are the same as those used to collect the frequency data, which is central to determining if a text is phonetically balanced. Results showed that neither transcription violates phonotactic rules, i.e. permissible combinations of speech sounds. The NWS is not phonetically balanced for BP if the phonemes are considered individually but is evenly distributed in terms of manner of articulation. The EP version of the NWS passage is a phonetically balanced text for EP.

scholarly journals Blowing in the wind: Using ‘North Wind and the Sun’ texts to sample phoneme inventories

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Louise Baird ◽  
Nicholas Evans ◽  
Simon J. Greenhill
Keyword(s):  
The Sun ◽  
Language Documentation ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
The North ◽  
North Wind ◽  
Design Requirements

Language documentation faces a persistent and pervasive problem: How much material is enough to represent a language fully? How much text would we need to sample the full phoneme inventory of a language? In the phonetic/phonemic domain, what proportion of the phoneme inventory can we expect to sample in a text of a given length? Answering these questions in a quantifiable way is tricky, but asking them is necessary. The cumulative collection of Illustrative Texts published in the Illustration series in this journal over more than four decades (mostly renditions of the ‘North Wind and the Sun’) gives us an ideal dataset for pursuing these questions. Here we investigate a tractable subset of the above questions, namely: What proportion of a language’s phoneme inventory do these texts enable us to recover, in the minimal sense of having at least one allophone of each phoneme? We find that, even with this low bar, only three languages (Modern Greek, Shipibo and the Treger dialect of Breton) attest all phonemes in these texts. Unsurprisingly, these languages sit at the low end of phoneme inventory sizes (respectively 23, 24 and 36 phonemes). We then estimate the rate at which phonemes are sampled in the Illustrative Texts and extrapolate to see how much text it might take to display a language’s full inventory. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings for linguistics in its quest to represent the world’s phonetic diversity, and for JIPA in its design requirements for Illustrations and in particular whether supplementary panphonic texts should be included.

The North Wind and the Sun∗

1996 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-23
Author(s):  
J. A. Marks
Keyword(s):  
The Sun ◽  
The North ◽  
North Wind

'Y Gogleddwynt a'r Haul': early transcriptions of Welsh in Le Maître Phonétique

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-146
Author(s):  
G. M. Awbery
Keyword(s):  
Spoken Language ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Short Sample ◽  
The North ◽  
North Wind

A traditional fable 'The North Wind and the Sun' was used for many years in the journal Le Maître Phonétique as a short sample text to illustrate the phonetic characteristics of a range of different languages, and as part of this activity several different Welsh versions of the fable were published. One, which reflects a speaker with a northern accent speaking in a formal register, appeared as early as 1911 and then again, slightly modified, in 1912 and 1949. Two further versions, reflecting informal, dialect usage in the Bala district and in Aber- porth in Cardiganshire, appeared in 1926. This paper explores what light these transcriptions shed on the spoken language, and asks how the phoneticians who made them came to be involved.

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