Sound Comparisons: Romance

<strong><em>SOUND COMPARISONS: ROMANCE</em></strong> <em>Sound Comparisons: Romance</em> is a free online resource for exploring the diversity in pronunciations across the Romance language family. At https://soundcomparisons.com/Romance, just tap, click or hover the mouse over the map to hear and compare instantaneously how the ‘same’ basic Romance words are pronounced, similarly or differently, in the many regional dialects and languages within Romance (a total of 16,033 word-recordings). The voices are those of native speakers of Romance languages, as spoken in 126 different locations throughout the Romance-speaking world. The geographical focus is on those parts of Europe where Romance languages are spoken (including of course Iberia, France, Italy, Romania and Romance-speaking parts of Switzerland and Belgium), and especially on those regions where rich dialectal diversity still survives — and indeed may urgently need to be recorded for posterity, where it may soon go extinct. Coverage also extends to where Romance languages have spread beyond Europe, especially where local varieties differ significantly in pronunciation from the European standard languages, e.g. Brazilian Portuguese, Acadian French in Canada, the Judaeo-Spanish (‘Ladino’) diaspora, and the Chabacano ‘creole’ Spanish of the Philippines. <em>Sound Comparisons: Romance</em> focuses on 128 words specifically selected as ideal Romance <strong>cognates</strong>, i.e. words that stem from the same origin in all Romance languages, but can differ significantly in pronunciation from region to region. The word <em>it rains</em>, for instance, is <em>pleut, plou, ploua,</em> <em>plova,</em> <em>piove, </em><em>chove</em> and <em>llueve</em> — in French, Catalan, Romanian, Romansh, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish respectively, as just a few examples. The https://soundcomparisons.com/Romance website is a user-friendly resource for speakers of the Romance languages to explore how the different branches of the Romance family relate to each other, to help also helps explain their origins and history. (Romance can also be compared with words ‘cognate’ even more deeply, across hundreds of languages and dialects in the Germanic, Celtic and Slavic families, at https://soundcomparisons.com/Europe.) The website is intended also for both teachers and learners of Romance languages, and can be viewed in several different user languages. For linguists, <em>Sound Comparisons</em> is a highly customisable research tool. It offers powerful, linguistically-informed search and filter functionality, and the ability to cite and download targeted sets of both sound files and phonetic transcriptions. For the large majority of its individual word recordings, <em>Sound Comparisons: Romance </em>also provides a close phonetic transcription in the International Phonetic Alphabet (see Version Information below). For more details on <em>Sound Comparisons: Romance</em>, and the wider <em>Sound Comparisons</em> framework to which it belongs, see: The https://soundcomparisons.com/Romance website, including the ‘how to cite’ and contributors pages. The overall https://soundcomparisons.com site, including the history of the project and its funding. The first, brief <em>Sound Comparisons</em> launch publication: Heggarty, Paul, Aviva Shimelman, Giovanni Abete, Cormac Anderson, Scott Sadowsky, Ludger Paschen, Warren Maguire, Lechoslaw Jocz, María José Aninao, Laura Wägerle, Darja Dërmaku-Appelganz, Ariel Pheula do Couto e Silva, Lewis C. Lawyer, Jan Michalsky, Ana Suelly Arruda Câmara Cabral, Mary Walworth, Ezequiel Koile, Jakob Runge &amp; Hans-Jörg Bibiko. 2019. Sound Comparisons: A new online database and resource for researching phonetic diversity. <em>Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences</em>, p.280–4. Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association.<br> https://icphs2019.org/icphs2019-fullpapers/pdf/full-paper_490.pdf <strong>DATA FILES AND FORMATS</strong> This Zenodo publication includes <strong>four</strong> data files: three data tables (all <strong>.tsv</strong> format, <strong>UTF8</strong>), and one .zip of sound files. <strong>SndComp_Romance_Languages.tsv</strong> A .tsv data-table of all 126 language varieties included in the <em>Sound Comparisons: Romance</em> database. One record (table row) per language in the data‑set. <strong>SndComp_Romance_Words.tsv</strong> A .tsv data-table of all 128 words in the <em>Sound Comparisons: Romance</em> database. One record (table row) per word in the data‑set. Strictly, ‘words’ here refers to <em>cognates</em> rather than to <em>meanings</em>. There are two different types of study within the <em>Sound Comparisons</em> framework, and Romance is of the cognate-based type, not the meaning-based type. To ensure that comparisons of divergence in phonetics are valid, the ‘words’ here are cognates, i.e. derived from the same origin in the ‘Proto-Romance’ common ancestor language, effectively a spoken form of Latin. Some cognate words may over time shift and diverge in meaning in some language varieties, so these words do not necessarily mean exactly the same in all the different varieties of Romance. <strong>SndComp_Romance_Transcriptions.tsv</strong> A .tsv data-table of all phonetic transcriptions in https://soundcomparisons.com/Romance. One transcription record (table row) per word per language in the data‑set. Records also include word <em>spellings</em> for reference languages for which established orthographies do exist, although these are relatively few in comparison to the number of regional languages and dialects covered. Records also include a number of fields to cover cases where the word-form recorded in a given language variety is not straightforwardly equivalent on all levels to the word-forms in most other language varieties. It may for example be only partially cognate, because it has a different morphological structure; or the cognate word recorded may have a different meaning in this individual language variety; and so on. <strong>SndComp_Romance_SoundFiles.zip</strong> A .zip of all 16,033 sound files in https://soundcomparisons.com/Romance, in .mp3 format. (Other formats, .ogg and .wav, are available on request by emailing Paul.Heggarty@gmail.com.) One (very short) .mp3 file per word per language in the data‑set. The zip file unzips as a folder structure within which each language variety has its own sub-folder. This sub-folder contains the c. 128 individual short sound files for that language variety. <strong>CORRESPONDENCES BETWEEN TRANSCRIPTION RECORDS AND SOUND FILES</strong> By default, each language variety has (at least) one sound file for each word. Also by default, for each of those sound files, the Transcriptions table (when complete) has one corresponding record (row), which includes an entry in the phonetic transcription field. In some contexts, however, the default one-to-one correspondence does not apply. <strong>Sound files, but no corresponding phonetic transcription record</strong>. This arises most often simply where the work to produce a phonetic transcription has not yet been completed. This is usually when a language variety has only recently been recorded and added to the database. In such cases, recordings are usually uploaded to make the sound file available as soon as possible, pending the further extensive work to produce phonetic transcriptions. On the website, such cases show as a blue ‘play’ triangle in place of the phonetic transcription. See under Version Information below. <strong>Records with a phonetic transcription, but no corresponding sound files</strong>. This arises most often for earlier historical stages of languages, such as Classical Latin. For these ‘historical’ languages, transcriptions of the <em>assumed</em> original pronunciations are provided for each word where possible (as far as this can be worked out with any confidence), but obviously there are no corresponding recording files. <strong>Records with a spelling entry only</strong>, and no entry in the phonetic transcription field, and no corresponding sound file. This arises in cases where a language variety has been entered as a spelling reference language only, not uniquely associated to any particular geographical variety of the language. This is so that <em>Sound Comparisons</em> can illustrate an established orthography for a language, and indeed these are typically intended as overarching compromise spelling systems that work for many regional pronunciation variants (using different ‘reading rules’). <strong>More than one sound file and corresponding phonetic transcription </strong>for the same single word in the same language variety. This can arise in two different types of case: In some language varieties, different <em>variant</em> <em>pronunciations</em> are possible for the same basic word. Where the native speaker of a language variety gave more than one variant, <em>Sound Comparisons</em> includes up to three of these. The corresponding sound files are distinguished by the addition of _pron2 or _pron3 to their filenames. In some language varieties, the native speaker provided multiple different <em>words</em>, often because one is the true <em>cognate</em> with the basic word in most other language varieties, but the other variant is actually more common in the default <em>meaning</em>. The sound files are distinguished by the addition of _lex2 or _lex3 to their filenames. <strong>Records with a ‘no-data’ entry .. in the phonetic transcription field</strong>. In <em>Sound Comparisons</em>, two dots .. are entered in the phonetic transcription field to show that no recording could be made for this word in this language variety. (This explicit entry helps distinguish this from cases where a recording is pending, but has not yet been made or uploaded.) Missing data usually arise because the target native (cognate) word has simply been lost from th

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