BANCARIO SIN GARANTÍA

Waqar and Waqar (2002) reported 13 diphthongs in Urdu. They reported that phonemically diphthongs do not exist in Urdu as there are no minimal pairs to show that contrast; however phonetically the deletion of any one of the three consonants /ʔ/, /j/and /v/ in a disyllabic word results in a diphthong. For example, deletion of /ʔ/ from /nə.ʔeː/ ےئن “new” results in diphthong [nəeː]; deletion of /j/ from /ke.jaː/ ایک “what” results in diphthong [keaː]; and deletion of /v/ from [hʊ.viː] یئوہ “happened” results in diphthong [hʊiː].

The experimental design of Waqar and Waqar (2002) is not very clear. For the perception of diphthongs, they prepared a list of words containing monophthongs and possible diphthongs. For the identification task they first trained 25 native speakers of Urdu on

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how to identify the number of syllables in a word. They did not give any details of the speakers’ backgrounds or the list of words carrying the possible diphthongs and monophthongs. The criteria for a vowel-vowel sequence to be considered a diphthong was whether more than half of listeners perceived a word carrying a vowel-vowel sequence as monosyllabic. After the perception task, the words that were perceived as monosyllabic (i.e. carrying diphthongs) were recorded by five male native speakers of Urdu in carrier phrases for further acoustic analysis. Out of 22 words carrying vowel- vowel sequences, listeners perceived 13 as monosyllabic. Their acoustic analysis of these 13 diphthongs is based on onglide (first vowel) + offglide (second vowel) duration and F1 and F2 at the onset and offset of these vowels. It is not clear how this data was measured as they did not provide any information. Their results show that Urdu has rising diphthongs, for instance the onglide duration is only 39% and offglide duration is 61%. They defined rising diphthongs as follows:

“If the first vowel of the diphthong is prominent, it is called a falling diphthong, and if the second vowel of the diphthong is prominent, it is called a rising diphthong”. (Waqar and Waqar, 2002:19)

According to Waqar and Waqar (2002:19), in Urdu a syllable cannot start with a vowel “except word initially”; hence the vowel-vowel sequences are treated as diphthongs instead of vowel sequences belonging to different syllables. Therefore, after the deletion of the consonant /ʔ/, the remaining word looks like [nə.eː], where /eː/ cannot stand alone as a syllable. Hence /eː/ gets merged with the preceding syllable and forms a diphthong, [nəeː], with a syllable structure CVVV, where the first vowel is shorter (mono-moraic) than the second vowel (bi-moraic). They conclude that the diphthong structure in Urdu is VVV, where the first component is short and the second component is long.

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Waqar and Waqar (2002) insist on the deletion of a time slot and argue against a vowel sequence of two long vowels, VVVV. For example, they reported that in the disyllable Urdu word /ko.ʔi/ “any” the syllable structure is CVV. CVV; however, after the deletion of /ʔ/ the syllable structure will be like CVV.VV. Urdu does not allow onset-less syllables except word initially, so this word will go through re-syllabification and the preceding vowel will have to lose a time slot in order to form a legitimate syllable. Their definition of legitimate syllable structure contradicts with the literature (as discussed in Section 3.1.1). In a phonological study of Urdu, Wali (2001) argues that deletion of /h/ and /ʔ/ in word final position results in the elongation of a preceding short vowel, which contradicts Waqar and Waqar (2002), as they report a deletion in time slot. Wali (2001:256) further claimed that “if {ʔ} occurs in the middle of the word, it may sometimes generate diphthongs as in [məsɑʔɪl] “problems” [məsɑɪl]”.

In a follow-up study, Sarwar, Ahmed and Tarar (2003) followed the same methods as employed by Waqar and Waqar (2002) except for the number of speakers (i.e. 3 males and 3 females) and listeners (i.e. 30). They reported that there are 17 diphthongs in Urdu and claimed that diphthongization results in the loss of a time slot. For example, they reported that in the Urdu word /dʒɑ.ʔo/ “go” with CVV.CVV structure, after the deletion of /ʔ/ the syllable structure becomes CVV.VV. As onset-less syllables are not allowed in Urdu, the second syllable merges with the preceding syllable and becomes CVV. This structure contradicts with the ones discussed by Waqar and Waqar (2002), i.e. CVVV. Further, they discussed the individual variation between speakers and reported that the diphthong in [dʒɑo] “go” was rising (i.e. the second vowel was longer than the first vowel) for male speaker A and falling for male speaker B (i.e. the first vowel was longer than the second vowel). Overall, their arguments lack clarity, exacerbated by numerous typographical mistakes. In addition, they did not provide any conclusive acoustic and

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statistical evidence to support their arguments about the deletion of a time-slot in the production of a diphthong.

Khurshid, Usman, and Butt (2003) reported the possibility of diphthongs and triphthongs in Urdu and claimed that out of a list of 37 possible diphthongs in Urdu, 18 were identified as diphthongs by 20 native speakers of Lahori Urdu (as in, Urdu as spoken in the city of Lahore, where speakers mostly have Punjabi as their first language). They trained the participants for syllable identification, then gave them a list of words carrying the possible diphthongs (i.e. vowel-vowel sequences) and asked them to syllabify those words. If more than 50% of the participants syllabified a word containing a vowel-vowel sequence as monosyllabic, they considered those vowel-vowel sequences as diphthongs. Based on the syllable identification task, they concluded that there were 18 diphthongs but no triphthongs. They also concluded that individual differences play an important role in syllabification and perception of a given set of words. For example, some speakers identified as few as 7 and others identified as many as 32 diphthongs out of a set of 37 words carrying vowel-vowel sequences.

After the identification task, the identified words were recorded by 3 males and 3 female speakers for acoustic analysis. Their acoustic analysis was based on the duration in milliseconds to identify if a sound was a diphthong or two separate vowels. The baseline for the verification of a diphthong was the maximum duration for a long monophthong, which they set at 350ms. Therefore, if a vowel-vowel sequence was pronounced within this duration, it was considered a diphthong, otherwise these were considered two separate long vowels. Khurshid et al. (2003) reported that in all cases the duration was below 350 ms for diphthongs and less than 150 ms if both vowels in the diphthong happen to be the short vowels. They summed the duration of two separately recorded monophthongs for each speaker and compared that sum with the duration of the

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corresponding diphthong. For example, [oe] (325 ms) was compared with the sum of /o/ (234 ms) and /e/ (236 ms), which turned out to be less than the average summed duration of two separate monophthongs.

Lastly, contrary to Waqar and Waqar (2002) and Sarwar et al. (2003), Khurshid et al. (2003:18) reported that Urdu has very few words containing two consecutive short vowels and “Majority of the diphthongs identified by the native speakers of Urdu contained two long vowels or one long and one short vowel”. They further added that in their list of 37 words they had only two words which contained two consecutive short vowels and only one of those was identified as a diphthong by the participants. A particular limitation of this study is that they did not perform any spectral analysis, and based their results solely on temporal analysis. They did not present any phonological arguments and the syllable identification task was done on a paper where participants read the words written in Urdu script.

Bhatti and Mumtaz (2016) present a follow up of three previous studies (Waqar and Waqar, 2002; Sarwar et al. 2003; Khurshid et al., 2003) plus two additional diphthongs, [eaː] and [aːe]. For the possible 26 diphthongs they recorded 78 words: three words per diphthong, produced by three male and three female speakers in a carrier phrase “I

said….”. Five male and five female speakers took part in the perceptual identification

task. Based on acoustic analysis (F1, F2, F3 at three different points: on-glide, transition and off-glide) and a perceptual identification task, where listeners were asked to identify the number of syllables in each word (70% votes or more), they concluded that Urdu has 16 diphthongs and five of these diphthongs are nasalised. Their acoustic analysis was mainly based on F1 and F2 of the first and second segment and the total duration of each diphthong. They reported that diphthongs behave like monophthongs in stressed and unstressed syllables and the maximum duration of a diphthong in an unstressed syllable

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was 148 ms. Hence they rejected a nasalised diphthong (i.e. [ɑ:ĩ:]) due to its longer duration.

Bhatti and Mumtaz (2016) disagreed with Waqar and Waqar (2002) and Sarwar et al. (2003) about the deletion of a time-slot to form a diphthong, since none of the diphthongs they found were formed via reduction of a time slot. Bhatti and Mumtaz (2016) reported a variety of combinations of long and short vowels in diphthong formation, such as: long- short, short-long, or long-long vowels. However, they did not give any temporal or spectral information to support this claim. Further, they claimed that in the formation of diphthong, /ə/ and /j/ were replaced by /æ/, and front vowels /ɪ/ and /j/ were replaced by /e/; however, they did not give any suitable examples and analysis to support this claim.

Farooq and Mumtaz (2016) investigated Urdu phonological processes in connected speech. They analysed 13,717 words for multiple pronunciation and reported that segment alternation (short vowel to long vowel), deletion (a consonant or vowel) and

insertion (mainly vowels to break consonant clusters) occurs at multiple levels due to a

number of factors, such as syllable structure and stress. The most interesting findings were: segment deletion never occurs at word initial position; consonantal deletion can result in the elongation of the preceding short vowel; /j/ deletion occurs word medially, usually to form a diphthong (e.g. /keːjaː/ “what” becomes [kæaː]); and /v/ deletion occurs intervocalically to form a diphthong and converts a disyllabic word into monosyllabic (e.g. /hʊ.viː/ “happened” becomes [huːiː]). They also reported that sometimes /v/ deletion occurs in unstressed syllables and does not result in the formation of diphthongs.

To summarise, despite contradictory arguments, most of these studies agree on the basic syllabic structure in Urdu; however, there are a number of disagreements on the onset and coda constraints as well as the re-syllabification (i.e. surface representations) of the underlying syllables. For instance, some studies (Ghazali (2002; Bokhari and Pervez,

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2003) reported the deletion of glottal stop at word initial a position, while others (Farooq and Mumtaz, 2016) reported that segment deletion does not occur at word initial position. Most of these studies agree that intervocalic deletion of /j/, /v/ and /ʔ/ converts the disyllabic words into monosyllabic words, and hence results in diphthongs. According to Ren (1986 cited in Aguilar, 1999:72), the distinction between diphthong and vowel-vowel sequence (hiatus) should be reflected acoustically, because hiatuses are two vowels from two syllables whereas diphthongs are two vowels in the same syllable. None of the studies on Urdu diphthongs mentioned above analysed the acoustic data with regard to this distinction; however, they do insist on the deletion of a time-slot and re-syllabification of disyllabic words into monosyllabic words. In addition, vowel-vowel sequences (hiatus) is reported to have a quicker transition than a diphthong (Quilis, 1981 cited in Aguilar, 1999:72). This was another parameter which none of the studies on Urdu diphthongs mentioned above explored.

Keeping in view these contradicting arguments from phonetics and phonology in the literature, the present study was designed to investigate the acoustics of the Urdu vowel- vowel sequences claimed as diphthongs in the literature. To this end, six vowel sequences resulting from the deletion of /j/ and /w/ were selected as candidate diphthongs and will be referred to as diphthongs in this study for the ease of reference.

3.1.3 Aims and Objectives

Besides all the contradictions, the studies discussed above indicate that it is possible to investigate the phonetic existence of diphthongs in Urdu. The phonetic investigation of diphthongs is required to test the predictions proposed by SLM, PAM, and PAM-L2 for the perception of SSBE vowels as discussed in Chapter 4, Chapter 5 and Chapter 6. The literature on Urdu phonetics and phonology suggests that diphthongs arise through the deletion of /j/, /v/ and /ʔ/ and restructuring of the syllable (Sarwar et al., 2003; Waqar and

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Waqar, 2002; Farooq and Mumtaz, 2016). This description conforms to the arguments presented by Ren (1986 cited in Aguilar, 1999:72):

“…[T]he idea is that the syllable components are planned before the phonetic realisation; so, the acoustic result of hiatus (i.e. two vowels in two syllables) has to be necessarily different from the acoustic result of diphthongs (i.e. two vowels in a syllable), which requires a restructuring in time and frequency to adjust both vocalic segments to the syllable frame”.

The present study analyses the acoustic properties of six vowel-vowel sequences (diphthongs) in order to answer the following questions:

a) What are the phonetics of Urdu vowel-vowel sequences?

b) Does Urdu have diphthongs or vowels in hiatus?

c) Does Urdu have rising and/or falling diphthongs? (The rising and falling diphthongs will be discussed with regard to the definition provided by Waqar and Waqar (2002:19) as discussed in Section 3.1.2)

d) Is the off-glide (second segment) always longer than the on-glide (first segment) in these vowel-vowel sequences (or diphthongs)?