Vowel Analysis

Analysis of Thai Contrastive Vowels

Introduction

Thai , the official language of Thailand consists of 9 vowels that are not only contrastive in terms of place of articulation but also in length (Abramson , 1962 . This paper aims to determine how the 9 basic Thai vowels are articulated and appropriately plot them on a vowel chart in terms of place of articulation length will not be contrasted within this paper

Methodology

Thai is a tonal language and tone is also contrastive , so in order to construct a set of words with different

meanings based on vowel articulation only , assurance had to be made that the tone for each word was the same . Working with a native speaker of Thai , together with a Thai Beginner 's text book (Becker , 2004 ) 4 sets of words that contrasted and compared vowel sounds was developed . The correct pronunciation of each word was ascertained and practiced until the researcher was confident that the correct pronunciation was mastered . Following the session conducted with the Thai speaker a recording was made of the researcher repeating the set of words for easier analysis . Each vowel from the word set was then plotted onto a vowel chart

Results

The following set of 5 words were extracted and plotted on a vowel chart to illustrate 5 contrastive vowels

[dta] eyes central , low , unrounded

[dti] to hit front , high , unrounded ?] big back , low , unrounded

[dt ?] nail front , low , unrounded

A further set of 4 words were also determined and plotted on...