Nar Phu , or ’Narpa , is a Sino-Tibetan variety spoken in the two villages of Nar and Phu, in the Valley of the Nar Khola in the Manang district of Nepal . It forms a dialect continuum with Manang and may be intelligible with it; however, the Nar and Phu share a secret language to confound Gyasumdo and Manang who would otherwise understand them.
25-509: The language lacks all middle vowels and the open mid vowel /ɔ/. Comparatively to the English language, the /g/ is not in the language. Nar Phu distinguishes four tones: high falling, high level, low rising murmured , and mid/low falling murmured. Nar-Phu has a different vowel system than other Tamangic languages, due to the amount of front vowels. Nar-Phu is a four-tone language. Tones 1 and 4 are falling; tones 3 and 4 are murmured. Tone 2
50-450: A stage whisper , is generally used only for dramatic or emphatic purposes. Whispering can strain the vocal cords more than regular speech in some people, for whom speaking softly is recommended instead. In 2010, it was discovered that whispering is one of the many triggers of ASMR , a tingling sensation caused by listening to soft, relaxing sounds. This phenomenon made news headlines after videos on YouTube of people speaking up close to
75-447: A greater extent Phuthi, display good evidence that breathy voicing can be used as a morphological property independent of any consonant voicing value. For example, in both languages, the standard morphological mechanism for achieving the morphosyntactic copula is to simply execute the noun prefix syllable as breathy (or 'depressed'). In Portuguese , vowels after the stressed syllable can be pronounced with breathy voice. Gujarati
100-472: A system of high and low tones developed in syllables that formerly had these sounds. Breathy voice can also be observed in place of debuccalized coda /s/ in some dialects of colloquial Spanish , e.g. [ˈtoðoɦ lo ˈθiɦneh som ˈblaŋkoh] for todos los cisnes son blancos . Whispering Whispering is an unvoiced mode of phonation in which the vocal cords are abducted so that they do not vibrate; air passes between
125-645: A variety of bats. In captive cotton-top tamarins, whisper-like behavior is speculated to enable troop communication while not alerting predators. Numerous species of bats (e.g., spotted bats , northern long-eared bats , and western barbastelles ) alter their echolocation calls to avoid detection by prey. Such a relaxed definition of whispering (i.e., production of short-range, low-amplitude acoustic signals which are significantly different than those produced at high amplitude) cannot be applied to humans without including vocalizations distinct from human whispering (e.g., creaky voice , and falsetto ). Further research
150-472: Is a phonation in which the vocal folds vibrate, as they do in normal (modal) voicing, but are adjusted to let more air escape which produces a sighing-like sound. A simple breathy phonation, [ɦ] (not actually a fricative consonant , as a literal reading of the IPA chart would suggest), can sometimes be heard as an allophone of English /h/ between vowels, such as in the word behind , for some speakers. In
175-533: Is a different type of phonation from aspiration . However, breathy and aspirated stops are acoustically similar in that in both cases there is a delay in the onset of full voicing. In the history of several languages, like Greek and some varieties of Chinese , breathy stops have developed into aspirated stops. There is some confusion as to the nature of murmured phonation. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and authors such as Peter Ladefoged equate phonemically contrastive murmur with breathy voice in which
200-426: Is distinguished by its clear, high quality. Nar-Phu has no formal gendered language system, but some suffixes are used to describe animals, even castrated male animals. Honorific Noun phrases are used when there is not a noun in place for said words. [1] Murmured voice Breathy voice / ˈ b r ɛ θ i / BRETH -ee (also called murmured voice , whispery voice , soughing and susurration )
225-453: Is minimal). Because of this, implementing speech recognition for whispered speech is more difficult, as the characteristic spectral range needed to detect syllables and words is not given through the total absence of tone . More advanced techniques such as neural networks may be used, however, as is done by Amazon Alexa . There is no symbol in the IPA for whispered phonation, since it
250-455: Is not used phonemically in any language. However, a sub-dot under phonemically voiced segments is sometimes seen in the literature, as [ʃʊ̣ḍ] for whispered should. Whispering is generally used quietly, to limit the hearing of speech to those closest to the speaker; for example, to convey secret information without being overheard or to avoid disturbing others in a quiet place such as a library or place of worship. Loud whispering, known as
275-524: Is still observed across biological taxa . An unlikely example is the croaking gourami . Croaking gouramis produce a high-amplitude "croak" during agonistic disputes by beating specialized pectoral fins. Female gouramis additionally use these fins to produce an acoustically distinct, low-amplitude "purr" during copulation . If whispering is restricted to include only creatures possessing vocal folds (i.e., mammals and some reptiles), whispering has been observed in species including cotton-top tamarins and
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#1732779943545300-488: Is the case with English intervocalic /h/. A third is to constrict the glottis, but separate the arytenoid cartilages that control one end. This results in the vocal folds being drawn together for voicing in the back, but separated to allow the passage of large volumes of air in the front. This is the situation with Hindi. The distinction between the latter two of these realizations, vocal folds somewhat separated along their length ( breathy voice ) and vocal folds together with
325-503: Is unusual in contrasting breathy vowels and consonants : બાર /baɾ/ 'twelve', બહાર /ba̤ɾ/ 'outside', ભાર /bʱaɾ/ 'burden'. Tsumkwe Juǀʼhoan makes the following rare distinctions : /nǂʱao/ fall, land (of a bird etc.); /nǂʱao̤/ walk; /nǂʱaˤo/ herb species; and /n|ʱoaᵑ/ greedy person; /n|oaʱᵑ/ cat. Breathy stops in Punjabi lost their phonation, merging with voiceless and voiced stops in various positions, and
350-400: The arytenoid cartilages to create audible turbulence during speech. Supralaryngeal articulation remains the same as in normal speech. In normal speech, the vocal cords alternate between states of voice and voicelessness. In whispering, only the voicing segments change, so that the vocal cords alternate between whisper and voicelessness (though the acoustic difference between the two states
375-484: The arytenoids making an opening ( whispery voice ), is phonetically relevant in White Hmong ( Hmong Daw ). A number of languages use breathy voicing in a phonologically contrastive way. Many Indo-Aryan languages , such as Hindi , typically have a four-way contrast among plosives and affricates (voiced, breathy, tenuis , aspirated) and a two-way contrast among nasals (voiced, breathy). The Nguni languages within
400-407: The camera in a soft whisper, giving the viewer tingles. People often listen to these videos to help them sleep and to relax. The prevalence and function of low-amplitude signaling by non-humans are poorly characterized. As such, it is difficult to ascertain the existence of whispering in non-humans. This is made more difficult by the specific physiology of human whispering. By sufficiently relaxing
425-513: The context of the Indo-Aryan languages like Sanskrit and Hindi and comparative Indo-European studies , breathy consonants are often called voiced aspirated , as in the Hindi and Sanskrit stops normally denoted bh, dh, ḍh, jh, and gh and the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European phonemes bʰ,dʰ,ǵʰ,gʰ,gʷʰ . From an articulatory perspective, that terminology is inaccurate , as breathy voice
450-514: The definition of whispering, it can be argued any number of non-human species demonstrate whisper-like behaviors. Often these behaviors function to increase fitness . If whispering is more broadly defined as the "production of short-range, low-amplitude acoustic signals," whispering is observed in myriad animals including non-human mammals, fish, and insects. If whispering is restricted to include only acoustic signals which are significantly different than those produced at high amplitude, whispering
475-481: The diacritic ◌̣ . There are several ways to produce breathy sounds such as [ ɦ ] . One is to hold the vocal folds apart, so that they are lax as they are for [h] , but to increase the volume of airflow so that they vibrate loosely. A second is to bring the vocal folds closer together along their entire length than in voiceless [h] , but not as close as in modally voiced sounds such as vowels. This results in an airflow intermediate between [h] and vowels, and
500-425: The four-way contrast in the system has been retained. In all five of the southeastern Bantu languages named, the breathy stops (even if they are realised phonetically as devoiced aspirates) have a marked tone-lowering (or tone-depressing) effect on the following tautosyllabic vowels. For this reason, such stop consonants are frequently referred to in the local linguistic literature as 'depressor' stops. Swazi, and to
525-418: The notation {V̤ } is used for whispery voice (or murmur), and {Vʰ } is used for breathy voice. Some authors, such as Laver, suggest the alternative transcription ⟨ ḅạɾ ⟩ (rather than IPA ⟨ b̤a̤ɾ ⟩) as the correct analysis of Gujarati /bɦaɾ/ , but it could be confused with the replacement of modal voicing in voiced segments with whispered phonation, conventionally transcribed with
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#1732779943545550-624: The southern branch of the Bantu languages , including Phuthi , Xhosa , Zulu , Southern Ndebele and Swazi , also have contrastive breathy voice. In the case of Xhosa, there is a four-way contrast analogous to Indic in oral clicks , and similarly a two-way contrast among nasal clicks, but a three-way contrast among plosives and affricates (breathy, aspirated, and ejective ), and two-way contrasts among fricatives (voiceless and breathy) and nasals (voiced and breathy). In some Bantu languages, historically breathy stops have been phonetically devoiced, but
575-459: The term "whispery voice". Both accept the term "murmur", popularised by Ladefoged. A stop with breathy release or a breathy nasal is transcribed in the IPA as [bʱ], [dʱ], [ɡʱ], [mʱ] etc. or as [b̤], [d̤], [ɡ̈], [m̤] etc. Breathy vowels are most often written [a̤], [e̤], etc. Indication of breathy voice by using subscript diaeresis was approved in or before June 1976 by members of the council of International Phonetic Association . In VoQS,
600-498: The vocal folds are held with lower tension (and farther apart) than in modal voice, with a concomitant increase in airflow and slower vibration of the glottis. In that model, murmur is a point in a continuum of glottal aperture between modal voice and breath phonation (voicelessness). Others, such as Laver, Catford, Trask and the authors of the Voice Quality Symbols (VoQS), equate murmur with whispery voice in which
625-417: The vocal folds or, at least, the anterior part of the vocal folds vibrates, as in modal voice, but the arytenoid cartilages are held apart to allow a large turbulent airflow between them. In that model, murmur is a compound phonation of approximately modal voice plus whisper. It is possible that the realization of murmur varies among individuals or languages. The IPA uses the term "breathy voice", but VoQS uses
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