Maltese

MASRI-HEADSET: A Maltese Corpus for Speech Recognition

“…Maltese, the national language of Malta, was one of the languages which, at the time of the METANET white papers, was ranked as having weak or no support under all four of the headings listed above (Rosner and Joachimsen, 2012). This is in spite of the fact that Maltese does not suffer from the first two of the list of criteria offered by Besacier et al (2014): the language not only has a long written tradition and a stable orthography (Azzopardi-Alexander and Borg, 2013), but is very well-studied linguistically at all levels, including the morphological (Mifsud, 1995;Hoberman, 2007;Gatt and Fabri, 2018, inter alia), syntactic (Fabri, 1993;Čéplö, 2018, inter alia), and phonological (Vella, 1994), as well as in terms of its historical development (Brincat, 2011) and typological status (Comrie, 2009). On the other hand, its web presence, while comparatively small compared to that of languages such as English, could be argued to be proportional to the size of its community of speakers.…”

Limits of audience design: Epenthetic glottal stops in Maltese

“…This becomes possible in Maltese because the glottal stop (ʔ) occurs in at least two functions. First of all, in Maltese, the glottal stop is a phoneme and can occur in onset and coda position in a syllable (Azzopardi-Alexander & Borg, 1996), even in consonant clusters with voiced (e.g., qdart /Ɂdɑrt/ English, 'I dared' and bqajt /bɁɑjt/ English, 'I remained') and voiceless stops (e.g., qtates /Ɂtɑtes/, English 'cats' and tqaqpiq /tɁɑɁpɪɁ/, English 'honking of a car horn'). Nevertheless, it also can occur as an epenthetic segment to mark otherwise vowel-initial words (e.g., attur -/at:ur/ →[Ɂat:ur]) (Mitterer, Kim, & Cho, 2019), as is well-known for English, Dutch, and German (e.g., the eagle, /ðə#i:ɡ ə l/ → [ðəɁi:ɡ ə l]).…”