Dear Dr. Deka, I think you are doing invaluable work if you are making spectral analysis of Assamese sounds. However, I would like to draw your attention to a few things which may interest you.
The spectrogram of a phoneme may vary according to the presence of other phonemes in the neighbouring environment (what is called formant transitions). After all, every student of linguistics knows how the formant transitions of English vowels vary according to the presence of different consonants. I think it will be wrong to call them three different phonemes. There may be allophonic variations, I agree, depending on the position of the sound. But in linguistics, when you call something a 'phoneme' you indicate a categorial difference. In this age and time spectral analyses are very important. But a native speakers intuition is also equally important. I, for instance, as a native speaker, find it difficult to swallow that the /s/ or /x/ (whatever you want to call it) are two different phonemes in Assamese in the word /xex/, as they are not categorially different. Regards, Shakuntala Mahanta p.s. Anybody interested in spectral analysis can download this free program called PRAAT in http://www.praat.org/ Shakuntala Mahanta let.uu.nl Trans 10, 3512 Jk, Netherlands Tel 031-30-2536052(off) Fax 031-30-2536000(off) http://www.let.uu.nl/~Shakuntala.Mahanta/personal Re: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/assamonline/message/2362
