Phonetic realization of glottal stop in Shugni.

Abstract

Shugni is an underdocumented Indo‐European language, mainly spoken in the Pamir mountains. Orthographically, Shugni used the apostrophe to symbolize the glottal stop phoneme, and the symbol only occurred word initially. In this paper, phonetic manifestation of glottal stop was examined, and the adjacent vowel [a] was compared under five conditions: (1) word‐initial glottal stop followed by [a] and a consonant #[ʔaC1], (2) word‐medial [C2aC1] sequence where [a] was also syllable‐medial, (3) word‐medial [C2aC1] sequence where [a] was syllable‐final, (4) word‐final [a] preceded by a consonant [C2a]#, and (5) a sequence of [C2a]# [ʔaC1] where glottal stop was word‐initial and intervocalic. Four acoustic parameters were measured, and glottal stop was defined as (1) an absence of formant transitions entering or leaving [a], (2) an abrupt start or end of [a]’s magnitude, (3) identifiable stop closure, and (4) irregular pulses produced by glottal tension. The results showed that irregular pulses were noticed in some but not all [a]s of words which began with the apostrophe. No other significant acoustic differences were noted among conditions. The results suggested that glottal stop in Shugni be described as non‐phonemic vowel laryngealization or creaky phonation. The word‐initial apostrophe had to be treated cautiously to interpret the variation.