Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan

Chiba and Kajiyama's "The Vowel" was a milestone in the study of vowel production. This work was made possible on the background of advancement of science in this country. Evolution of acoustical sciences in these days is reviewed. Completion of this monograph should have opened days of glory in phonetic and acoustic research in Japan. But the Pacific War broke out before publication and Japanese science was isolated from the international scientific community. Further tragedies of war on sciences and scientists and post-war developments are described.

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This paper describes how the experimental study published as Chiba and Kajiyama's The Vowel, Its Nature and Structure was conducted in pre-war Japan. Human, institutional, and instrumental environments of the study were investigated based upon various documents, including newly found laboratory notes written by Masato Kajiyama. Survey of the early citations of The Vowel, both in home and abroad, was also reported.

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Focusing on the process of mid-vowel raising (*e>i, *o>u), which took place throughout the Ryukyuan-speaking area in the past, this paper provides one type of method for historical phonology using the data collected from modern dialects. Based on the pattern of change shown by the spirantization of the /k/ sound (*k>h), observed in the northern region of the main Ryukyu island, which took place before [-high] vowels (*a, *e, *o ), and focusing on the fact that the /k/ is spirantized just in front of *o, but not in front of *e in a number of dialects in this region, this paper concludes that the process of mid-vowel raising proceeded from the front vowel (e>i) rather than the back one (o>u). Thus, this paper shows that an examination of a trace of competing change may often provide a key for analyzing the process of a certain change already completed in the past.

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Eight native speakers of English from four countries (England, the U. S., Canada, and Australia) uttered 10 sets of 26 semantically ambiguous sentences used in earlier studies on English intonation and location of nucleus, and the contours of the overall utterances and of the sentence nuclei were carefully identified and examined using sound analyzing software ‘Onseirokubunken.’ The examination found the following tendencies: the choices became nuclei in alternative questions; a pause was inserted before “or” in alternative questions; sentences with the structure“All...not” meaning partial negation ended with falling tone; sentences with the structure “not...all” meaning partial negation ended with falling-rising tone; the preceding focus had a greater prominence in cleft sentences having two foci; and so forth. In comparison with the description in the earlier studies, the overall rate of concordance of intonation pattern was 62% and that of the nucleus was 56%.

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