appreciate Shakuntala for the response!
[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.] re: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/assamonline/message/2363 sorry Shakuntala! :) one would probably appreciate that i did not tell about this findings for over a decade, but seeing IIT Guwahati talking about it i felt i needed to tell. the following are two experiments to explore (will publish the results of both experiments in a subsequent email). thanks, rabin DATA PREPARATION: /xex/ lets give a name for first /x/ form left as S01 and second /x/ as S03. so we call /xe/ equals S01E, and /xex/ equals S01ES03. Now lets take the word /xaxadhar/, i.e., sasadhar. in sasadhar, /sa/ equals S01, and lets define /dha/ equals DH01 and /r/ equals R01. so we can write S01S01DH01R01 instead of sasadhar or xaxadhar. lets record DH01, R01, S01, S01E and S03 respectively ( i have recorded DH01.wav, R01.wav, S01.wav, S01E.wav and S03.wav that can be downloaded form link http://www.geocities.com/rabindeka/data/phonemes/ ) EXPERIMENT 1: xex = S01ES03 -------------------------> (1) sasadhar = S01S01DH01R01 --------------> (2) lets set S01 = S03 so the equation (1) and (2) can be rewritten as follows xex = S03ES01 -------------------------> (3) sasadhar = S03S03DH01R01 --------------> (4) now what will you hear for playing the sequence, i.e., S03ES01, in Equation (3)? will you hear same, i.e, S01ES03 as in Equation (1)? similarly, what will you hear for playing the sequence, i.e., S03S03DH01R01, in Equation (4)? will you hear same, i.e, S01S01DH01R01 as in Equation (2)? Note: in order to create a word from phonemes, one would need sophisticated digital signal processing (DSP) tools. such tools are not cheap, e.g., MATLAB is a seven thousand dollar tool set. so you would need to rely on observation. EXPERIMENT 2: the PRAAT tool is developed using digital signal processing principles/algorithms (though no way to validate its performance accuracy). this tool can be used to assess the frequency bandwidth for S01.wav and S03.wav (you might as well record your won voice for S01 and S03 respectively). use PRAAT to measure frequency-bandwidth for S01.wav and S03.wav -------------> (5) now use fundamental science in order to find frequency-bandwidth for human voice, then compare this frequency-bandwidth with the results found in Equation (5). SUMMARY: the above two experiments would enable one to assess whether S01 equal S03 or not. the second experiment will give a scientific account whether S01 and S03 are voiceless or not. WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF ONE EQUATE S01 to S03? a range of voice-activity related equipment/product will fain that are used in digital signal processing discipline in general -- including telecommunications, wireless, voice over IP, speech recognition, biomedical ... --- this is what is something IIT GUWAHATI should talk!
