Vowel Plot

The quality of all the tokens of the four vowels in reading of the North Wind and the Sun passage is shown in the plot of the first two formants in Figure 3. The frequency of the formants was measured using Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2016), and the values have been converted to a Bark scale using the formula suggested by Traunmüller (1990). Ellipses have been drawn to enclose about 68% of the tokens using the vowel-plotting utilities developed by McCloy (2012).

Figure 3. Plot of the first two formants (F1 and F2) of all the vowels in the North Wind and the Sun Passage

It can be seen that, while the close front vowel /i/ is quite distinct from the other three vowels, there is some overlap between /a/, /o/ and /u/. Some of the tokens of /a/ with a relatively non-open quality occur in the first syllable of pangambara (‘traveller’), and in the phonetic transcription, the quality of this vowel is shown as [ə] in three out of four of the tokens of this word. It is probable that the quality of this vowel is influenced by its quality in Standard Malay, where the word is pengambara (with /ə/ in the first syllable).