Abstract:
Preceding a theoretical exploration of issues in a language is a basic research. Through such basic descriptive study, the vitality of the language is aided and documented. This is vital especially for the less studied languages such as EkeGusii that has not been phonetically studied and documented especially using scientific methods. Following Peterson and Barney (1952), this work is an acoustic study of the vowels and voiceless stops of Ekegusii. Its goal is to transcend the impressionistic descriptions previously in the 1960s by Whiteley (1965) and Guthrie (1967). Specifically, the work explores the seven vowels of Ekegusii /i e ɛ a ɔ o u/ along with the intervening voiceless stops /p t k/ within the Source-Filter Theory of sound production. The purpose of this study is to give a complete description of the vowels and stops and document them for reference by various fields from linguistics to machine translation. The scope of impressionistic phonetics is limited by capabilities of human senses and is not verifiable while experimental phonetics like this present study extends and backs-up impressionistic description. The main objective of this study is to give a complete description of the acoustic qualities of the vowels and stop consonants from the oral data got from a purposively selected sample of twelve (four males, four females and four children), bearing in mind their speech mannerisms, geographical and dialectal considerations. Audio data was recorded as the informants read out word lists and carrier phrases bearing target sounds into a microphone connected to a computer running on Praat sampled at 44100 Hz. Analysis of audio data is primarily done using Praat software. Further, quantitative data analyses were done using MS-Excel spread sheets and SPSS with the results presented in tables, charts and written descriptions for each sound, each subject and group. The study mainly found out that EkeGusii adopts a seven vowel system with length contrast making the vowels to be phonologically fourteen. The vowels also display age, sex and dialectal variations. Results for stop consonants show that stops can be discriminated by features such as voice-onset-time, burst intensity and stop duration. Significantly, the research findings provide useful basis for codification and documentation of EkeGusii phonetics for the two dialects.
