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ABSTRACT
This work is an acoustic examination of Esan Sound System. Its goal was to re-evaluate prevailing articulatory evidence on the segmental units and source acoustic bases to justify that evidence. The impetus for the study is the dearth of experimental studies of the Esan Sound System. Esan is classified as a member of Edoid group of Languages by Elugbe (1989).
This study employed the spectrographic analysis using the praat program. ‘Praat’ is the Dutch word for ‘talk’ or ‘speak’. It is a free scientific computer software package for the analysis of speech in phonetics. Data for this study comprised short samples of Esan utterances which were collected using the Swadesh 200 word-list of basic lexical items and a digital tape recorder as the main instruments. Data obtained were further transcribed following the International Phonetic Alphabet tradition.
The findings from this work showed that: formants of vowels display three articulatory features of their acoustic frequency, there is a lack of constant relationship between the fundamental frequency of Esan vowels in isolation compared to their realization in words and the lowering of the velum gives an additional resonance chamber for nasal consonants when compared to their non-nasal counterparts.
The results from the study would be relevant for Esan language teachers and students as it provides more authentic information about the sound system of the language. The improvement on prevailing artiucaltory evidence on the sound system of Esan would enhance future documentation of the language.
