Article

Name: Quantitative characteristics of vowels in the Telengit language

Authors: A. A. Dobrinina

In the section Фонетика

Abstract: The language of the Telengits, who live in Ulagan and partially in Kosh-Agach districts of the Altai Republic, is considered to have no written tradition; the children are taught the Altai literary language at schools. In Telengit there have remained significant differences in phonetics, morphology, vocabulary from the Altaic language and at the same time, a number of traits relate it to the North-Altai dialects, particularly the Tuba dialect. The objective of this study is to determine the quantitative characteristics of the vowels of the Telengit language. The linguistic material was collected by A. A. Dobrynina in the settlements of the Kosh-Agach district (village of Cocora) and in the villages of the Ulagan district (Ulagan, Saratan, Pasparta) of the Altai Republic in 2017. Recordings were made in mp3 format in the field conditions, the data were converted into wav format using Freemake Audio Con-verter, the decryption process and the analysis of materials was made using SpeechAnalyzer computer program for cre-ating and processing audio files. In Telengit, as in most Turkic languages, quantitative differentiation of the vowels along with the articulatory pa-rameters of a row, rise and labialization function as a main systemic feature: phonemes oppose by shortness and length. Analysis of instrumental data evidence the secondary phonological longitude of vowels in all the recorded subdialects. However, the length of the long vowels in Telengit is shorter than in the Altai language. In the speech of the Telengits secondary long vowels are on average in 1.5 times longer than the short ones. In the Onguday dialect of Altai-Kizhi, the ratio of short and long vowels is an average of 2.1 (with the dispersion of average numbers from 1.7 to 2.9), in Ust-Kan area it is 2.2 (with the scatter of the average parameters in the range 2.1-2.3). Positional duration of Telengit vowels is fairly consistent, but indicators are lower than in the Altai language. In the Telengit language broad vowels in the open syllable are longer than a narrow vowel of the following syllable in 1.6 times (with the scatter of the average for territorial dialects of 1.5 – 1.7), and in the Onguday and Ust-Kan subdialects of Altai-Kizhi an open vowel is longer than a narrow one on average in 1.7 times (in the range of 1.1 and 2.2). Non-systematic feature of quantitative indica-tors does not give grounds for supposition of primary vowel length functioning in Telengit. Despite the variability of quantitative characteristics of vowels in the language of the Telengits, the data obtained indicate the generality of the phonetic transformations occurring in the languages of the Altai-Sayan ethnic areal.

Keywords: phonetics, vowel, language of the Telengits, dialect, acoustic analysis

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