Ancient Sounds: mixing acoustic phonetics,

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Ancient Sounds mixing acoustic
phonetics, statistics and comparative
philology to bring speech back from the
past Investigator John Coleman Project
Partner John Aston Phonetics Laboratory Stati
stics Laboratory University of Oxford
University of Cambridge
_at_sounds_ancient
Coleman supported by an AHRC Science in Culture
Innovation Award
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• What would comparative and historical phonology
  be like if we worked with sounds instead of
  symbols?
• Can interesting statistical or signal processing
  methods give insights into language?
• Could we bring back to life the sounds of dead
  languages?

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Phylogenetic phonetics
After Schleicher (1860) Deutsche Sprache, and
Aston, Buck, Coleman, Cotter, Jones, Macaulay,
MacLeod, Moriarty, and Nevins (2011) Phylogenetic
inference for function-valued traits speech
sound evolution. doi 10.1016/j.tree.2011.10.001
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Phylogenetic phonetics
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Phylogenetic phonetics
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Regular similarities ? Shared ancestryDissimilari
ties ? Historical divergence
Latin Italian Spanish Portuguese French
1 'unu-s/m 'uno 'uno u(?) œ, ?
2 'duo 'due dos dois, doi? dø
3 tres tre tres tres, tre? t?wa
4 'kwatwor 'kwatro 'kwatro 'kwatru kat?
5 'kwi?kwe 't?i?kwe 'si?ko, '?i?ko 'si?ku s?k
6 seks s?i seis s?is, s?i? sis
7 'septem 's?te 'sjete 's?ti s?t
8 'okto 'oto 'ot?o 'oitu ?it
9 'novem 'n?ve 'nweve 'n?v? nœf
10 'dekem 'dj?t?i 'dj?s, 'dj?? 'd?? dis
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But these are not sounds!
Latin Italian Spanish Portuguese French
1 'unu-s/m 'uno 'uno u(?) œ, ?
2 'duo 'due dos dois, doi? dø
3 tres tre tres tres, tre? t?wa
4 'kwatwor 'kwatro 'kwatro 'kwatru kat?
5 'kwi?kwe 't?i?kwe 'si?ko, '?i?ko 'si?ku s?k
6 seks s?i seis s?is, s?i? sis
7 'septem 's?te 'sjete 's?ti s?t
8 'okto 'oto 'ot?o 'oitu ?it
9 'novem 'n?ve 'nweve 'n?v? nœf
10 'dekem 'dj?t?i 'dj?s, 'dj?? 'd?? dis
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But these are not sounds!
Latin Italian Spanish Portuguese French
1 'unu-s/m 'uno 'uno u(?) ö ?
2 'duo 'due dos dois, doi? dø
3 tres tre tres tres, tre? t?wa
4 'kwatwor 'kwatro 'kwatro 'kwatru kat?
5 'kwi?kwe 't?i?kwe 'si?ko, '?i?ko 'si?ku s?k
6 seks s?i seis s?is, s?i? sis
7 'septem 's?te 'sjete 's?ti s?t
8 'okto 'oto 'ot?o 'oitu ?it
9 'novem 'n?ve 'nweve 'n?v? nöf
10 'dekem 'dj?t?i 'dj?s, 'dj?? 'd?? dis
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Sound change continuum nasalization in un-us, -um
LPC spectrogram 1
un-o
LPC spectrogram
LPC spectrogram
LPC spectrogram
LPC spectrogram
LPC spectrogram
LPC spectrogram
Interpolated LPC spectrograms
LPC spectrogram 2
u
GENERATION OF SYNTHETIC SPEECH D Moore, J Coleman
Eur. Patent 1,504,443
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Sound change continuumnasal vowel lowering
LPC spectrogram 1
u
LPC spectrogram
LPC spectrogram
LPC spectrogram
œ
LPC spectrogram
LPC spectrogram
LPC spectrogram
Interpolated LPC spectrograms
LPC spectrogram 2
?
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Objectives for 2015 (this award)
Triangulation backwards to reconstruct
(audible) acoustic examples of the likely
ancestors of words in Romance (from Latin),
Germanic, and Greek Develop techniques to
overcome obstacles besetting these
methods Presentations, publications and a
workshop on the new methods To lay foundations
for an attack on other branches Celtic,
Slavonic, Indo-Aryan