An Acoustic Comparative Study On The Oral Vowels And Nasal Vowels In Minnan Zhangzhou Dialect

Owing to one of the most powerful dialects remaining the elements of Ancient Chineseintegrally, Minnan Dialect has been taken into account by Linguists at home and abroad fromtime to time. Nevertheless, these fruitful research results mostly concern on using traditionaltheoretical approaches to explore and describe the historical strata or sound-change rules ofMinnan Dialect, while very few choose the modern experimental method to analyze the speechfacts of Minnan Dialect, especially the nasal feature, and that's also the case for other dialects inChinese.Basing on the extraordinary nasal features of Minnan dialect and important role ofexperimental phonetics in the modern speech research, this project chooses Nasal Vowels ofMinnan dialect as the experimental object, meanwhile select Zhangzhou as the dialectal surveypoint, where is located in the most southern part of Fujian province and regarded as one of thetwo original places of Minnan Dialect in a sense of Linguistics (the other one isQuanzhou ),emphasizing on the acoustic feature of Nasal Vowels in Zhangzhou Dialect from theperspective of experimental phonetics.Considering the lack of a systematical and profound study of the topic, this paper intends tocarry out a comprehensive research of nasal vowels in Zhangzhou areas beginning withclassification of all these nasal vowels and their corresponding oral vowels on the criterial of therelationship between the main vowel and its adjacent element, and all these vowels have beenclassified into four levels basing on that. (1) Level 1 are about the single vowels, which cotains7 single oral vowels [a],[?],[e],[?],[i],[o],[u],and 4 pairs of nasal vowels and theircorresponding oral vowels [a]～[a?],[?]～[?],[?]～[?],[i]～[i?];(2)Level 2 are about thecompound vowels only with medial sound, and there are fairs of nasal vowels and theircorresponding oral vowels [ia]～[ia?],[iu]～[iu?],[ua]～[ua],[ui]～[ui],[ia～ia?];(3)Level 3 areabout the compound vowels only with ending, and there are seven pairs of nasal vowels and their corresponding oral vowels[ai]～[a|~i],[au]～[a?u],[ au?]～[au?],[a?]～[a?],[?]～[?],[?]～[?],[i?]～[i?];(4)Level 4 are about the compound vowels both with medial sound and ending,and there four pairs of nasal vowels and their corresponding oral vowels[iau]～[iau?],[uai]～[uai?],[iau?]～[ia?u?],[ia?]～[ia?].In addition to that the experimental parts beginning withacoustic feature of oral vowels for comparing with their corresponding nasal ones thenprincipally dealing with that of acoustic feature of all these 4 level vowels from four parametersof broadband spectrogram, frequency of the first three formants, the energy manifesting in thespectrograms, the pattern of formants and the acoustic vowel chart .The experimental resultsmight be helpful in the comparative study of nasal vowels and oral vowels and might be afrontier study of Phonetics and Dialectology both in Minnan dialect and Chinese dialect. Furthermore, it would make clear the speech nature of nasal vowels of Minnan dialects in SouthernFujian through the discussion of the issues, and eventually be beneficial to the classification ofnasal features and the provision of a typological distribution not only to the study of Zhangzhoudialect, but for that of Minnan dialects within and outside Fujian province.There are totally 8 sections in this paper. Section 1 begins with an introduction of theresearch background of this project and the current research situation on nasalization both inMinnan Dialect and other dialect in Chinese. Beside that presents an overview on Zhangzhouarea and Zhangzhou Dialect as well.Section2 is mainly about the relevant experimentalintroduction on vowels and nasal vowels along with some experimental procedure about sample,equipment,datum treatment and sound speaker. etc. Section 3 is about the acoustic feature of 7single vowels in Zhanghzhou dialect .Section 4 to Section7 are about the acoustic feature andcomparative analysis of all pairs of nasal vowels and oral vowels in Zhangzhou dialect, whichdivided into 4 levels according to structural characteristic of these coupled vowels. Section 8 setsan overall conclusion on the experimental results about single vowel system, 4 levels of nasalvowels and corresponding oral vowels, in addition, points some shortage about this project andput a undone scope for future research.