Vowel Plot

The frequency of the first two formants of all the vowels in the recording of the passage was measured in Praat, with the exception of the first syllable of satuju ‘agree’ and sakuat ‘as strong’, for which there is no vowel. (The representation of these words is discussed in the section on syllable structure.) The formant frequencies were then converted to an auditory Bark scale using the formula suggested by Traunmüller (1990) and plotted on inverted axes of F1 against F2 to show the quality of the vowels. Ellipses are drawn based on a bivariate normal distribution to encircle 68% of the tokens of each vowel, representing plus or minus one standard deviation (McCloy 2012).

In addition to the allophonic variation involving /i/ and /u/ mentioned above, there is substantial variation in the quality of /a/, as can be seen by the size of the ellipse for /a/. This will be discussed in the section on allophone of /a/.