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Ancient Sounds: Reviving Speech with Acoustic Phonetics & Comparative Philology

Using acoustic phonetics and comparative philology, this project explores bringing ancient language sounds back to life. Investigator: John Coleman. Project Partner: John Aston. University of Oxford and University of Cambridge collaboration. Follow @sounds_ancient for updates. Phylogenetic phonetics studies. Sound change continuum analysis. Generating synthetic speech. Objectives for 2015 include reconstructing sounds from Latin, Germanic, and Greek languages. Innovative approach in linguistic research.

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Ancient Sounds: Reviving Speech with Acoustic Phonetics & Comparative Philology

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  1. Ancient Sounds: mixing acoustic phonetics, statistics and comparative philology to bring speech back from the past Investigator: John Coleman Project Partner: John Aston Phonetics Laboratory Statistics Laboratory University of Oxford University of Cambridge @sounds_ancient Coleman supported by an AHRC Science in Culture Innovation Award

  2. What would comparative and historical phonology be like if we worked with sounds instead of symbols? • Can interesting statistical or signal processing methods give insights into language? • Could we bring back to life the sounds of dead languages?

  3. Phylogenetic phonetics After Schleicher (1860) Deutsche Sprache, and Aston, Buck, Coleman, Cotter, Jones, Macaulay, MacLeod, Moriarty, and Nevins (2011) Phylogenetic inference for function-valued traits: speech sound evolution. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2011.10.001

  4. Phylogenetic phonetics

  5. Phylogenetic phonetics

  6. Regular similarities ⇒ Shared ancestryDissimilarities ⇒ Historical divergence

  7. But these are not sounds!

  8. But these are not sounds!

  9. Sound change continuum: nasalization in un-us, -um LPC spectrogram 1 [un-o] LPC spectrogram LPC spectrogram LPC spectrogram LPC spectrogram LPC spectrogram LPC spectrogram Interpolated LPC spectrograms LPC spectrogram 2 [ũ] GENERATION OF SYNTHETIC SPEECH D Moore, J Coleman Eur. Patent 1,504,443

  10. Sound change continuum:nasal vowel lowering LPC spectrogram 1 [ũ] LPC spectrogram LPC spectrogram LPC spectrogram [œ̃̃] LPC spectrogram LPC spectrogram LPC spectrogram Interpolated LPC spectrograms LPC spectrogram 2 [ɛ̃]

  11. Objectives for 2015 (this award) “Triangulation backwards”: to reconstruct (audible) acoustic examples of the likely ancestors of words in: Romance (from Latin), Germanic, and Greek Develop techniques to overcome obstacles besetting these methods Presentations, publications and a workshop on the new methods To lay foundations for an “attack” on other branches: Celtic, Slavonic, Indo-Aryan

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