| title | subtitle | author | job | framework | highlighter | hitheme | widgets | mode | knit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Japanese Vowel Trapezoid |
Cooler vowel plots with R |
Manuel Moreno-Carral |
Comp. Linguist |
io2012 |
highlight |
tomorrow |
selfcontained |
slidify::knit2slides |
- This is the presentation for the final project in the "Developing data products" Coursera course.
- This course is part of the "Data Science" specialization.
- The other part of the project is the Shiny app.
The app might be found at the following link Japanese Vowels.
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Vowels are sounds made by our throat (voice box) and tongue, without any othr artiuclator. They can be described with two frequence parameters:
- F1: or first formant, it describes how open the mouth of the speaker is. The more open, the higher the frequency.
- F2: or second formant, it descrives how far back the tongue is. The further back, the lower the frequency.
There are other formants, and othr ways to describe vowels, but this is a widely used system.
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Japanese is a language with a five-vowel system, or pentavocalism. This system very common among the world's languages; other notorious examples are Spanish and Greek.
- a is the open-most vowel, the only one with the maximum aperture.
- e and o are mid, sitting at half the aperture.
- i and u are closed vowels, with maximum closeness.
Unlike other 5-vowel languages, Japanese u is pronounced [ɯ], a little bit fronted and less closed. This will be visible in our graph.
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The app has 5 checkboxes which display the 5 different phonemes of the Japanese Language. To do so, the app queries a dataset on Japanese phonology, which has been loaded and structured so that every vowel had a third row containing its unique IPA identifier.