LINGUIST List 13.476

Wed Feb 20 2002

Qs: Transcription Equipment, Final Vowel/Indo-Aryan

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Charley Rowe, transcription equipment
2. MPI EVA Jakarta Field Station, Final vowels in Indo-Aryan

Hello Linguists,

We have corpora consisting of good-quality oral recordings on standard
audio cassette, along with identical versions on cd. 

In order to transcribe the material efficiently, we are looking for
footpedals to control the rewind, ff, stop, and play functions. The
only problem so far is that "conventional" transcribers--typically used
in the medical secretarial environment--are not intended for fine
analysis. Can you recommend either footpedals that connect with the
computer and work with cd rom, or a professional-linguist quality
cassette transcriber with footpedals?

Many thanks, and I will summarize to the list.

Charley Rowe

Dear fellow linguists,

I am working on a paper about the change of final /a/ to schwa-like
vowels in some Austronesian languages. Apparently this is an areal
feature that originated in the Indianized Javanese kingdom of
Majapahit. Since the change appears to lack phonetic motivation, I
have been intrigued by the possibility that it may have been triggered
by influence from Indic. I seem to recall that the change of short
/a/ to a schwa-like vowel is common in Indic languages, and that final
short vowels can get weakened or even deleted. Unfortunately, I
haven't been able to obtain any information about these phenomena here
in Indonesia.

If anyone has any information regarding the weakening of short vowels
(especially /a/, and especially in final position) in Indo-Aryan
languages, I would greatly appreciate hearing from you. Please reply
to:

Sincerely, 

Uri Tadmor