Synthesis By Rule as a Tool for Phonological Research
The phonologist, having analysed a corpus of phonetic data and proposed tentative phonological rules, must test these rules by generating novel utterances for acceptance or rejection by an informant. There are certain methodological problems in such testing which could be avoided by the use of speech synthesized by rule. Synthesis by rule is now a practical technique, and a synthesis-by-rule system at Haskins Laboratories has been used to formulate rules for General American English.
Synthesis of the pharyngealization feature in Arabic
Abstract An investigation of the pharyngealization by analysis/synthesis is realized as a contribution to the development of a synthesis-by-rule system for Arabic. The present paper describes the acoustic parametrization of the Arabic pharyngealized consonants / s /, / d /, / t /, / ∂ / using a formant synthesizer. Acoustical studies showed that the usual description of the Arabic vowel system as a set of 3 short vowels and their 3 long counterparts is inadequate. A system of 12 vowels including 6 pharyngealized ones is defined according to phonetic and phonological facts. The rules dealing with the extension of pharyngealization in connected speech are established and validated by synthesis.
The Poet, The Critic, and the Moralist: Horace, Epistles 1.19
I begin by quoting from two valuable recent works on Horace. Professor Brink in his Horace on Poetry (1964) writes: ‘The centre of the short piece lies in lines 21—34. Readers, among them critics and poets, had denied one aspect of the Odes which was surely above criticism—the striking originality of these poems. Horace's defence turns on the question of originality’ (p. 180) and ‘Epistle 19 is unique in that it alone among the literary satires and letters reiterates Horace's claim to be the Latin fidicen’ (p. 182). And Dr. McGann in his Studies in Horace's First Book of Epistles (Collection Latomus 100: 1969): ‘In Ep. 19... as in the literary satires, Horace is a practising poet or at least a very recently practising one, engaged in defending himself against hostile criticism’ (p. 40) and ‘As the only epistle concerned exclusively with literary matters, the nineteenth stands apart’ (p. 82).