Acoustic Representation of BODO and RABHA Phonemes

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ISSN No. Volume 1, No.1, July – August Jyotismita Talukdar et al., International Journal of Computing, Communications and Networking, 1(1), July – August, 1-9

2012

International Journal of Computing, Communications and Networking Available Online at http://warse.org/pdfs/ijccn01112012.pdf

Acoustic Representation of BODO and RABHA Phonemes 1

Jyotismita Talukdar1, Nabankur Pathak2 Asia Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand, E-mail:jyotismita4@gmail.com 2 Gauhati University, India, E-mail:phtassam@gmail.com

ABSTRACT In this paper we studied the spectral features of Bodo and Rabha Phonemes. The spectral features are studied using formant frequency and Cepstral coefficients. Depending on the analysis on cepstral features and formant frequencies of Bodo and Rabha phonemes and words we observed that significant variation of cepstral coefficients are observed among the Bodo vowels. The cepstral variation is found to be maximum with respect to vowel /o/ and minimum corresponding to vowel /u/, in case of male speakers. Similarly, for female Bodo speakers, the maximum variation of cepstral measure is found corresponding to vowels /o/ and minimum in case of /i/.In case of Rabha vowels, i.e., /o/, /a/, /i/, ./e/,, /u/ and /w/ for both male and female speakers the range of variation of the cepstral coefficient is found to be maximum in case of male speakers with respect to vowel /u/ and minimum with respect to vowel /o/. In case of female speaker, the maximum variation of cepstral co-efficient is found in case of vowel /o/ and minimum with respect to vowel /e/. This observation may be helpful in sex determination for both Bodo and Rabha speakers.The range of variation of cepstral coefficients for Bodo and Rabha male is found within the range of 3.8177 >CBodo>1.1523 and 8.1329>CRabha>2.0579 respectively. The range of variation for female is found 1.9578>CBodo>0.9276 and 7.6546>CRabha>2.4127. i.e. the variation of cepstral features for Bodo vowels is less (Male-2.6654; Female1.0302) with respect to the Rabha vowels (Male-6.0750; Female-5.2419) i.e., the former is stable as compared to the latter. The investigation have shown that the range of

formant frequency is maximum in case of isolated vowels, but when the vowels are placed in the nucleus of a structure like CV, VC or CVC, the formant frequency decreases. Keywords: Acoustic Representation, Phonemes, Cepstral Features 1. INTRODUCTION The Bodos and the Rabhas are the early ethnic and linguistic communities settled in the North-Eastern part of India. The Bodos belong to a larger group of ethnicity called the BodoKachari. Racially, they belong to a Mongoloid stock of the Indo-Mongoloids or Indo-Tibetans. Mythologically, according to Dr. Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, a well-known historian, the Bodos are “the Offspring of son of Vishnu and mother Earth”, who are termed as Kiratas during the epic period. They are recognized as a plain tribe in the 6th schedule of the constitution of India. Historically, there are different views on the early migration of the Mongolian into the North-Eastern part of India. Some of them are: According to Grierson’s “The Linguistic Survey of India”, the Mongolian settled in old Assam, migrated from HoangHo and Yangtze River banks and scattered and dwelt in different river banks of the state. The upper course of the Yangtz and Hoang-Ho in the North-West China were the original home of the Tibeto-Burman races. The hierarchy of Bodo community is shown in figure .

Hierarchy of Bodo & Rabha Languages 1 @ 2012, IJCCN All Rights Reserved


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