Phonetics and Speech Feature Extraction

Introduction

1. What is a logographic writing system? Name three early examples.
   One symbol represents a whole word. The earliest known writing systems (Sumerian, Chinese, Mayan) were mainly logographic.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 15, Introduction
2. How did early logographic systems also represent sounds? Give the Sumerian example.
   Some symbols were used purely for their sound. The cuneiform sign pronounced ba meaning “ration” could also function simply as the sound /ba/. Early Chinese oracle-bone characters also contain phonetic elements.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 15, Introduction
3. What are the three types of purely sound-based writing systems, with an example of each?
   Syllabic (Japanese hiragana), alphabetic (Roman alphabet), consonantal (Semitic writing systems).
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 15, Introduction
4. From what script do the Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and Roman alphabets derive?
   A West Semitic script, presumed to have been modified by Western Semitic mercenaries from a cursive form of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 15, Introduction
5. Where did the Japanese syllabaries come from?
   From a cursive form of Chinese phonetic characters, which were used in Chinese to phonetically represent Sanskrit in Buddhist scriptures that came to China in the Tang dynasty.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 15, Introduction
6. Define speech recognition and text-to-speech.
   Speech recognition: transcribing waveforms into text.
   Text-to-speech (TTS): converting text into waveforms.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 15, Introduction
7. Define phonetics.
   The study of the speech sounds used in the world's languages: how they are produced in the vocal tract, how they are realized acoustically, and how they can be digitized and processed.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 15, Introduction