Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, Jan 19, 2003
This paper argues that monosyllabic verb root-suffix combinations in Ibibio form a foot, specific... more This paper argues that monosyllabic verb root-suffix combinations in Ibibio form a foot, specifically, a (bi)syllabic trochee. Our argument is that without the assumption of a bisyllabic foot, phonological generalizations regarding rootsuffix structures cannot be captured. The suffixed verbs take one of two shapes: a heavy-light trochee, or a light-light trochee. The templatic choice is strictly determined by morphological inflection. We explain processes affecting vowel quantity: vowel lengthening and shortening, as forced by the prosodic requirement of template satisfaction. The overall picture is that Ibibio is a language with every possible form of the trochee, which forms the domain of several phonological processes and the basis of segmental distribution.
We review and elaborate an account of consonantal strength that is founded on the model of speech... more We review and elaborate an account of consonantal strength that is founded on the model of speech as a modulated carrier signal. The stronger the consonant, the greater the modulation. Unlike approaches based on sonority or articulatory aperture, the account offers a uniform definition of the phonetic effect lenition has on consonants: all types of lenition (such as debuccalisation, spirantisation, and vocalisation) reduce the extent to which a consonant modulates the carrier. To demonstrate the quantifiability of this account, we present an analysis of Ibibio, in which we investigate the effects of lenition on the amplitude, periodicity, and temporal properties of consonants. We propose a method for integrating these different acoustic dimensions within an overall measure of modulation size.Not only does the modulated-carrier account cover all the classically recognised lenition types, but it also encompasses loss of plosive release in final stops – which, although not traditionall...
Journal of the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (DHASA), 2021
Being a multilingual and multicultural nation, Nigeria is blessed with over 525 languages (Blench... more Being a multilingual and multicultural nation, Nigeria is blessed with over 525 languages (Blench, 2014) from four different language families. The sheer number of indigenous languages makes an interesting tapestry! Unfortunately, not much attention has been paid to the study of our indigenous languages, with all the abundant prospects. This paper is a work in progress and a recently funded research project by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) of Nigeria, to rescue language endangerment in Nigeria by redefining the ecology of languages through geospatial technologies; concentrating on those languages located in the southern part of Nigeria, and scalable to other regions of Nigeria and beyond. The main objective of the project is to implement a location-aware infrastructure or framework that functions proactively in real-time, for enhanced language ecology, and precise visualization of the language’s vitality status for each language spoken in the region under study. The pr...
0. Revision summary. This document replaces L2/15-117. In the present proposal, the information o... more 0. Revision summary. This document replaces L2/15-117. In the present proposal, the information on the user community is slightly expanded and principles describing the formation of numerals are added. Some reorganization in the order of digits and punctuation is made and an additional symbol (standing for ‘or’) is proposed for encoding. 1. Introduction. The Medefaidrin script was created for an artificial language Medefaidrin used by members of an indigenous Christian church Oberi Okaime (Obɛri Ɔkaimɛ, ‘Church freely given’), which was active in the Nigerian province of Calabar in the 1930s near Itu on the Western bank of Cross-River. The authors are, most probably, Michael Ukpɔn and Akpan Udɔfia. A natural language for them is Ibibio-Efik, which belongs to the Atlantic family of the Niger-Congo languages [Hau 1961; Gibbon et al 2010;
members of an indigenous Christian church Oberi Okaime (Obɛri Ɔkaimɛ, ‘Church freely given’), whi... more members of an indigenous Christian church Oberi Okaime (Obɛri Ɔkaimɛ, ‘Church freely given’), which was active in the Nigerian province of Calabar in the 1930s near Itu on the Western bank of Cross-River. The authors are, most probably, Michael Ukpɔn and Akpan Udɔfia. A natural language for them is Ibibio-Efik, which belongs to the Atlantic family of the Niger-Congo languages [Hau 1961; Gibbon et al 2010;
This study reports on a production experiment and a new computational model in an attempt to reso... more This study reports on a production experiment and a new computational model in an attempt to resolve the question of the status of floating Low tones in Ibibio. The pitch height of high tones (H), low tones (L) and downstepped high (!H) tones in a set of utterances spoken by an Ibibio speaker were first measured acoustically and secondly modelled computationally. Results show that there is a difference between a floating L and an overt L. Furthermore, the overt Low tone causes a higher degree of lowering than the floating Low tone.
Author(s): Rovenchak, Andrij; Gibbon, Dafydd; Ekpenyong, Moses; Urua, Eno-Abasi | Abstract: This ... more Author(s): Rovenchak, Andrij; Gibbon, Dafydd; Ekpenyong, Moses; Urua, Eno-Abasi | Abstract: This is a proposal to encode the Medefaidrin script in the Unicode Standard. The script was published in Unicode version 11.0 in 2018. Medefaidrin was created to write the artificial language Medefaidrin. The language was used in the 1930s by the Christian church called Oberi Okaime in the southern Nigerian province of Calabar and is in limited use today.
The speech rhythm of three West African languages is measured with current methods which focus on... more The speech rhythm of three West African languages is measured with current methods which focus on durational relationships of various units. It is shown that predictions about the phonological structure and their classification in terms of speech rhythm can be confirmed with data from these languages. 1.
Lenition degrades information: consonant allophony in Ibibio John HARRIS & Eno-Abasi URUA Consona... more Lenition degrades information: consonant allophony in Ibibio John HARRIS & Eno-Abasi URUA Consonantal lenition degrades information in the speech signal and should be understood as having an analogous impact on phonological representations. The point is illustrated by a phonological and instrumental study of Ibibio (Lower Cross, Nigeria). The more general claim is that informational asymmetries in the speech signal are matched by informational asymmetries in phonology. 1.
Transcription, the written representation of spoken human language, is vital to any language docu... more Transcription, the written representation of spoken human language, is vital to any language documentation and revitalization project. This hands-on workshop introduces participants to a variety of different transcription methodologies for various purposes. The workshop primarily focuses two types of transcription: (i) phonetic transcription using the International Phonetic Alphabet and (ii) discourse transcription where elements of well-known transcription systems are introduced (Conversation Analysis – developed at UC Santa Barbara). The workshop emphasizes the nuts and bolts of these transcription systems and how to apply transcription practices to documentation and revitalization projects.2015 NSF/BCS 1500841: CoLang 2016: Institute on Collaborative Language Research – ALASKA Alaska Native Language Cente
Evaluation constitutes a crucial part of quality assurance work. In higher education institutions... more Evaluation constitutes a crucial part of quality assurance work. In higher education institutions (HEIs) in Nigeria, evaluation in the pedagogical domain has usually been characterized by the traditional approach, a one-sided evaluation of students by the teachers. Over the years, research in education has shown that student evaluation of teachers improves the overall quality of teaching and learning. In this study, in addition to the current situation in higher education institutions in Nigeria, we advocate an evaluation of teachers by the students for formative purposes in order to provide a better strategic output of the educational products in HEIs in Nigeria.
The West African Language Archive (WALA) initiative has emerged from a number of concurrent proje... more The West African Language Archive (WALA) initiative has emerged from a number of concurrent projects, and aims to encourage local scholars to create high quality decentralised repositories documenting West African languages, and to make these repositories available to language communities, language planners, educationalists and scientists via an internet metadata portal such as OLAC (Open Language Archive Community). A wide range of criteria has to be met in designing and implementing this kind of archive. We discuss these criteria with reference to experiences in documentation work in three very different ongoing language documentation projects, on designing an encyclopaedia, on documenting an endangered language, and on creating a speech synthesiser. We pay special attention to the provision of metadata, a formal variety of catalogue or housekeeping information, without which resources are doomed to remain inaccessible.
It is well‐known that many East Asian languages have lexical (i.e. phonemic) prosody, and languag... more It is well‐known that many East Asian languages have lexical (i.e. phonemic) prosody, and languages such as Mandarin are very well described. African languages are also frequently mentioned in the literature as tone languages, and phonetic interface patterns such as downstep are well‐documented. It is less well‐ known that the functionality of tone patterning in African tone languages is fundamentally morphosyntactic rather than phonemic, in that (a) tonal patterning is specific to particular parts of speech, (b) tones may have inflectional function and play a role in both (c) derivational and (d) compounding word formation patterns and (e) in marking syntactic phrasal templates. The aim of this paper is both to document the morphosyntactic functionality of tones in African languages within a typological context as compared to East Asian tone languages such as Mandarin, and to develop finite state architectures for tone handling in practical Text-To-Speech synthesis in health and ag...
The problem associated with building language processors for African tone languages seems intract... more The problem associated with building language processors for African tone languages seems intractable. These problems, which range from homographs handling to domain specific words not in language dictionaries, have resulted in the boundless growth of the font’s system. Some attempts have been made in recent times to overcome these problems. One interesting attempt is the development of the tone language keyboard. The design of such hardware is complex (using more functional keys) and from users’ perspective, more troublesome (keeping an auxiliary of key combinations). This paper implements a software approach to solving this problem for Ibibio, a Lower Cross language of the (new) Benue-Congo language sub-family widely spoken in the southeastern, oil rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The system is designed to enable language database or dictionary switching, provided such dictionaries are designed in a csv file format. We discuss the problems and challenges of this design and prof...
This paper argues that monosyllabic verb root-suffix combinations in Ibibio form a foot, specific... more This paper argues that monosyllabic verb root-suffix combinations in Ibibio form a foot, specifically, a (bi)syllabic trochee. Our argument is that without the assumption of a bisyllabic foot, phonological generalizations regarding rootsuffix structures cannot be captured. The suffixed verbs take one of two shapes: a heavy-light trochee, or a light-light trochee. The templatic choice is strictly determined by morphological inflection. We explain processes affecting vowel quantity: vowel lengthening and shortening, as forced by the prosodic requirement of template satisfaction. The overall picture is that Ibibio is a language with every possible form of the trochee, which forms the domain of several phonological processes and the basis of segmental distribution.
Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, Jan 19, 2003
This paper argues that monosyllabic verb root-suffix combinations in Ibibio form a foot, specific... more This paper argues that monosyllabic verb root-suffix combinations in Ibibio form a foot, specifically, a (bi)syllabic trochee. Our argument is that without the assumption of a bisyllabic foot, phonological generalizations regarding rootsuffix structures cannot be captured. The suffixed verbs take one of two shapes: a heavy-light trochee, or a light-light trochee. The templatic choice is strictly determined by morphological inflection. We explain processes affecting vowel quantity: vowel lengthening and shortening, as forced by the prosodic requirement of template satisfaction. The overall picture is that Ibibio is a language with every possible form of the trochee, which forms the domain of several phonological processes and the basis of segmental distribution.
We review and elaborate an account of consonantal strength that is founded on the model of speech... more We review and elaborate an account of consonantal strength that is founded on the model of speech as a modulated carrier signal. The stronger the consonant, the greater the modulation. Unlike approaches based on sonority or articulatory aperture, the account offers a uniform definition of the phonetic effect lenition has on consonants: all types of lenition (such as debuccalisation, spirantisation, and vocalisation) reduce the extent to which a consonant modulates the carrier. To demonstrate the quantifiability of this account, we present an analysis of Ibibio, in which we investigate the effects of lenition on the amplitude, periodicity, and temporal properties of consonants. We propose a method for integrating these different acoustic dimensions within an overall measure of modulation size.Not only does the modulated-carrier account cover all the classically recognised lenition types, but it also encompasses loss of plosive release in final stops – which, although not traditionall...
Journal of the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (DHASA), 2021
Being a multilingual and multicultural nation, Nigeria is blessed with over 525 languages (Blench... more Being a multilingual and multicultural nation, Nigeria is blessed with over 525 languages (Blench, 2014) from four different language families. The sheer number of indigenous languages makes an interesting tapestry! Unfortunately, not much attention has been paid to the study of our indigenous languages, with all the abundant prospects. This paper is a work in progress and a recently funded research project by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) of Nigeria, to rescue language endangerment in Nigeria by redefining the ecology of languages through geospatial technologies; concentrating on those languages located in the southern part of Nigeria, and scalable to other regions of Nigeria and beyond. The main objective of the project is to implement a location-aware infrastructure or framework that functions proactively in real-time, for enhanced language ecology, and precise visualization of the language’s vitality status for each language spoken in the region under study. The pr...
0. Revision summary. This document replaces L2/15-117. In the present proposal, the information o... more 0. Revision summary. This document replaces L2/15-117. In the present proposal, the information on the user community is slightly expanded and principles describing the formation of numerals are added. Some reorganization in the order of digits and punctuation is made and an additional symbol (standing for ‘or’) is proposed for encoding. 1. Introduction. The Medefaidrin script was created for an artificial language Medefaidrin used by members of an indigenous Christian church Oberi Okaime (Obɛri Ɔkaimɛ, ‘Church freely given’), which was active in the Nigerian province of Calabar in the 1930s near Itu on the Western bank of Cross-River. The authors are, most probably, Michael Ukpɔn and Akpan Udɔfia. A natural language for them is Ibibio-Efik, which belongs to the Atlantic family of the Niger-Congo languages [Hau 1961; Gibbon et al 2010;
members of an indigenous Christian church Oberi Okaime (Obɛri Ɔkaimɛ, ‘Church freely given’), whi... more members of an indigenous Christian church Oberi Okaime (Obɛri Ɔkaimɛ, ‘Church freely given’), which was active in the Nigerian province of Calabar in the 1930s near Itu on the Western bank of Cross-River. The authors are, most probably, Michael Ukpɔn and Akpan Udɔfia. A natural language for them is Ibibio-Efik, which belongs to the Atlantic family of the Niger-Congo languages [Hau 1961; Gibbon et al 2010;
This study reports on a production experiment and a new computational model in an attempt to reso... more This study reports on a production experiment and a new computational model in an attempt to resolve the question of the status of floating Low tones in Ibibio. The pitch height of high tones (H), low tones (L) and downstepped high (!H) tones in a set of utterances spoken by an Ibibio speaker were first measured acoustically and secondly modelled computationally. Results show that there is a difference between a floating L and an overt L. Furthermore, the overt Low tone causes a higher degree of lowering than the floating Low tone.
Author(s): Rovenchak, Andrij; Gibbon, Dafydd; Ekpenyong, Moses; Urua, Eno-Abasi | Abstract: This ... more Author(s): Rovenchak, Andrij; Gibbon, Dafydd; Ekpenyong, Moses; Urua, Eno-Abasi | Abstract: This is a proposal to encode the Medefaidrin script in the Unicode Standard. The script was published in Unicode version 11.0 in 2018. Medefaidrin was created to write the artificial language Medefaidrin. The language was used in the 1930s by the Christian church called Oberi Okaime in the southern Nigerian province of Calabar and is in limited use today.
The speech rhythm of three West African languages is measured with current methods which focus on... more The speech rhythm of three West African languages is measured with current methods which focus on durational relationships of various units. It is shown that predictions about the phonological structure and their classification in terms of speech rhythm can be confirmed with data from these languages. 1.
Lenition degrades information: consonant allophony in Ibibio John HARRIS & Eno-Abasi URUA Consona... more Lenition degrades information: consonant allophony in Ibibio John HARRIS & Eno-Abasi URUA Consonantal lenition degrades information in the speech signal and should be understood as having an analogous impact on phonological representations. The point is illustrated by a phonological and instrumental study of Ibibio (Lower Cross, Nigeria). The more general claim is that informational asymmetries in the speech signal are matched by informational asymmetries in phonology. 1.
Transcription, the written representation of spoken human language, is vital to any language docu... more Transcription, the written representation of spoken human language, is vital to any language documentation and revitalization project. This hands-on workshop introduces participants to a variety of different transcription methodologies for various purposes. The workshop primarily focuses two types of transcription: (i) phonetic transcription using the International Phonetic Alphabet and (ii) discourse transcription where elements of well-known transcription systems are introduced (Conversation Analysis – developed at UC Santa Barbara). The workshop emphasizes the nuts and bolts of these transcription systems and how to apply transcription practices to documentation and revitalization projects.2015 NSF/BCS 1500841: CoLang 2016: Institute on Collaborative Language Research – ALASKA Alaska Native Language Cente
Evaluation constitutes a crucial part of quality assurance work. In higher education institutions... more Evaluation constitutes a crucial part of quality assurance work. In higher education institutions (HEIs) in Nigeria, evaluation in the pedagogical domain has usually been characterized by the traditional approach, a one-sided evaluation of students by the teachers. Over the years, research in education has shown that student evaluation of teachers improves the overall quality of teaching and learning. In this study, in addition to the current situation in higher education institutions in Nigeria, we advocate an evaluation of teachers by the students for formative purposes in order to provide a better strategic output of the educational products in HEIs in Nigeria.
The West African Language Archive (WALA) initiative has emerged from a number of concurrent proje... more The West African Language Archive (WALA) initiative has emerged from a number of concurrent projects, and aims to encourage local scholars to create high quality decentralised repositories documenting West African languages, and to make these repositories available to language communities, language planners, educationalists and scientists via an internet metadata portal such as OLAC (Open Language Archive Community). A wide range of criteria has to be met in designing and implementing this kind of archive. We discuss these criteria with reference to experiences in documentation work in three very different ongoing language documentation projects, on designing an encyclopaedia, on documenting an endangered language, and on creating a speech synthesiser. We pay special attention to the provision of metadata, a formal variety of catalogue or housekeeping information, without which resources are doomed to remain inaccessible.
It is well‐known that many East Asian languages have lexical (i.e. phonemic) prosody, and languag... more It is well‐known that many East Asian languages have lexical (i.e. phonemic) prosody, and languages such as Mandarin are very well described. African languages are also frequently mentioned in the literature as tone languages, and phonetic interface patterns such as downstep are well‐documented. It is less well‐ known that the functionality of tone patterning in African tone languages is fundamentally morphosyntactic rather than phonemic, in that (a) tonal patterning is specific to particular parts of speech, (b) tones may have inflectional function and play a role in both (c) derivational and (d) compounding word formation patterns and (e) in marking syntactic phrasal templates. The aim of this paper is both to document the morphosyntactic functionality of tones in African languages within a typological context as compared to East Asian tone languages such as Mandarin, and to develop finite state architectures for tone handling in practical Text-To-Speech synthesis in health and ag...
The problem associated with building language processors for African tone languages seems intract... more The problem associated with building language processors for African tone languages seems intractable. These problems, which range from homographs handling to domain specific words not in language dictionaries, have resulted in the boundless growth of the font’s system. Some attempts have been made in recent times to overcome these problems. One interesting attempt is the development of the tone language keyboard. The design of such hardware is complex (using more functional keys) and from users’ perspective, more troublesome (keeping an auxiliary of key combinations). This paper implements a software approach to solving this problem for Ibibio, a Lower Cross language of the (new) Benue-Congo language sub-family widely spoken in the southeastern, oil rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The system is designed to enable language database or dictionary switching, provided such dictionaries are designed in a csv file format. We discuss the problems and challenges of this design and prof...
This paper argues that monosyllabic verb root-suffix combinations in Ibibio form a foot, specific... more This paper argues that monosyllabic verb root-suffix combinations in Ibibio form a foot, specifically, a (bi)syllabic trochee. Our argument is that without the assumption of a bisyllabic foot, phonological generalizations regarding rootsuffix structures cannot be captured. The suffixed verbs take one of two shapes: a heavy-light trochee, or a light-light trochee. The templatic choice is strictly determined by morphological inflection. We explain processes affecting vowel quantity: vowel lengthening and shortening, as forced by the prosodic requirement of template satisfaction. The overall picture is that Ibibio is a language with every possible form of the trochee, which forms the domain of several phonological processes and the basis of segmental distribution.
Uploads
Papers by Eno-Abasi Urua