In his new book titled ‘Labials in Amharic and Arabic: An Acoustic Study’, Dr Yehia Abdel Mobdy Mohamed
(pictured), Assistant Professor of Arabic at Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q), presents an empirical comparative study of two close languages, Amharic and Arabic, that belong to South Semitic languages in keeping with the majority of linguistic classifications.
Acoustic phonetics is a sub-field of phonetics that focuses on studying the physical aspects of speech sounds, including frequency, intensity and duration by using speech analysis tools like sound spectrograph and the oscillograph. Acoustic studies are currently not limited to linguistics. Empirical acoustic studies and their applications are also used in many specialities and sciences such as hearing and speech therapy, telecommunications engineering and music programmes.
Acoustics are also especially important to linguists who study phonetics and try to provide accurate descriptions of sounds. Traditional phonetics studies which are based on the researcher’s capabilities and how sensitive their ears are cannot always be relied on as an accurate reference, especially when conducting studies about a language whose sound system is different from the researchers’ mother tongue.
“Even though Arabic and Amharic enjoy many similarities on all linguistic levels, including the sound system, since they belong to the Southern Semitic language branch, there are also many differences as a result of Amharic being influenced by neighbouring non-Semitic languages. In addition, the book compares Arabic labial consonants to their counterparts in Amharic while focusing through an empirical acoustic study on the types of labials and their relation to vowels,” said Mohammed.
The Peninsula
