Nomlaki vowel quality: An acoustical and archival examination

Abstract

This study examines vowel quality and duration in Nomlaki, a Wintuan language of Northern California that survives via archival recordings. Phonemic vowel length is reconstructed in Proto-Wintuan (Shepherd, 2005) and is inherited in Nomlaki’s sister languages (Pitkin, 1984; Lawyer, 2015), producing a vowel system of five long/short pairs. Despite this, current orthography used in Nomlaki tribal language revitalization distinguishes Nomlaki vowel pairs via tense/lax quality. This study uses data from archival recordings to document how F2 primarily distinguishes these historically long/short vowel pairs. Data consisted of 1574 tokens spoken by two male speakers recorded in 1953 and 1975. Each token contained F1, F2, F3, and duration information; 234 tokens were labelled according to the official tribal spelling when spelling was known. A Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) model was fit with 5-fold cross-validation on the labelled set, after which each of the other tokens was assigned a vowel label per the LDA model. The model was 64% accurate. 86.7% of the variance was accounted for by the first dimension, 8.2% by the second, and 4.8% by the third. These dimensions were primarily weighted by F2, F1, and duration, respectively. The author has no known conflicts of interest.