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Meglan Vlach

Meglan Vlach. Terrence Szymanski Ling 512 Fall 2005. About Vlach. Spoken in several small villages in northern Greece, along the border of Macedonia. The Vlach people and their language are mentioned in accounts dating back several centuries. May be descendents of Roman military colonists.

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Meglan Vlach

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  1. Meglan Vlach Terrence Szymanski Ling 512 Fall 2005

  2. About Vlach • Spoken in several small villages in northern Greece, along the border of Macedonia. • The Vlach people and their language are mentioned in accounts dating back several centuries. • May be descendents of Roman military colonists.

  3. Vlach Dialects • Vlach is an Indo-European Romance language, related to Romanian • The term “Vlach” can refer to either Aromanian or Megleno-Romanian • The language shows influences of Latin, from which it is derived, and from the neighboring Greek and Slavic languages.

  4. Vlach Today • Only a few thousand speakers • Most are bilingual in Greek • Many of the farmers had to take up part-time jobs in cities in recent decades. • Now, much of the younger generation is not coming back to the villages • (Vlach is an endangered language)

  5. The Vlach Informant • Grew up on a farm in the village of Karpi, speaking only Vlach (Megleno-Romanian) until he went to school (around age 7) and had to learn Greek. • Learned English in high school • Studied in England before moving to Michigan • Speaks Vlach only in the summers when he visits home, Greek with friends in Michigan & Greece, English at work and at home with his wife. • Professor of ancient and modern Greek.

  6. Sound Inventory • Consonants:

  7. Sound Inventory • Vowels:

  8. Consonant Project: Affricates • Compared durations of stops, fricatives, and affricates. • No surprises: affricates are slightly longer than fricatives and stops, but not twice as long.

  9. Stop, Fricative, & Affricate Duration • Chart:

  10. Affricate Spectrograms • [tS] sometimes had a visible burst, sometimes not: [patSe] “pig’s feet soup”

  11. Affricate Spectrograms • [ts] typically had a double-burst visible in the spectrogram: [tatsi] “be quiet!”

  12. Vlach Stress • Similar to stress in English • Stress depends on four factors: • Pitch • Intensity • Duration • Vowel Quality

  13. Vlach Stress • Some stress changes are more salient than others (numbers are percent change from unstressed to stressed) • Formant Frequencies (0-20%) • Duration (10% for [intrA], 35% for [naltu]) • Intensity (10-15%) • Pitch (20-45%)

  14. Vowel Reduction & Stress • Most vowels show some reduction in unstressed syllables • The degree of reduction depends on the vowel, and may not be compulsory.

  15. Vowel Reduction & Stress

  16. Vlach Stress • Stress is produced (and thus perceived?) as a combination of factors • Is any of these factors more significant than the others? • Is it possible to change the stress by modifying only one factor?

  17. Stress Experiment • Hypothesis: stress can be modified by adjusting only the pitch of an otherwise stress-neutral token. • Natural [ÈintrA] • Natural [inÈtrA] • Artificial (hypothesized) [ÈintrA] • Artificial (hypothesized) [inÈtrA] • Artificial stress-neutral? (flat pitch) • Artificial dual-stress

  18. Experiment Results • 15 of 290 tokens identified as having first-syllable stress (10 of which were the control) • What went wrong? • Control tokens influenced results • (After hearing the first instance of the natural tokens, every modified token was identified as second-syllable stress) • Neutral token wasn’t neutral

  19. My favorite Vlach words [fUÈsu´u] “the beans” [ÈwAUwA] “eggs”

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