Bengali and Spanish vowels: a comparative analysis

Bengali and Spanish differ in their vowel systems. Bengalí has seven vowels /i, e, ɛ, a, ɔ, o, u/ and Spanish has five vowels: /i, e, a, o, u/. This study compared the acoustic characteristics of Bengali and Spanish oral vowels. F1 and F2 data were collected from speech samples using Praat software....

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Chowdhury, Abdullah Rafique-um-Munir, Hossain, Md Imran
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:Uruguay
Institución:Universidad Católica del Uruguay
Repositorio:LIBERI
Idioma:ben
OAI Identifier:oai:liberi.ucu.edu.uy:10895/4563
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/10895/4563
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Bengali vowels
Spanish vowels
Phonetics
Descripción
Sumario:Bengali and Spanish differ in their vowel systems. Bengalí has seven vowels /i, e, ɛ, a, ɔ, o, u/ and Spanish has five vowels: /i, e, a, o, u/. This study compared the acoustic characteristics of Bengali and Spanish oral vowels. F1 and F2 data were collected from speech samples using Praat software. Results showed that Spanish vowels' space was smaller than Bengali. Some realizations of Spanish /i/, /o/ and /a/ were similar to Bengali /e/, /u/ and /ɛ/ respectively. Moreover, open allophones of Spanish /e/ and /o/ —[ɛ] and [ɔ] respectively— have potential to be perceived as Bengali /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ phonemes. In conclusion, this comparison of the vowel systems suggest that Bengali speakers would tend to convert the penta-vocalic system of Spanish into a hepta-vocalic system due to similarities in acoustic realizations; they may use open [ɛ] and [ɔ] as frequent allophones of Spanish /a/ and /o/ respectively.