HMM automatic vowel detection

[MarcoP]

Thanks, Marco!
I attach the folios I started from (taken from Takahashi). I selected these folios randomly, but from the same "language" to have some consistency.

It's basically EVA, but I made some changes to test digraphs and trigraphs. I came up with a way to represent "o+gallow" as a single glyph. It's always the voiced version of that gallow. So oT = D, oP = B, oK = G. Once again, this is not a proposed translation, just a way to test digraphs.

If you represent o+gallow as a consonant, eva q looks like it has to be a vowel.

I also replaced: 
EVA in = n 
EVA iin = m 
EVA n = l
EVA l = s
EVA ee = u

The most interpretative part is that I developed the benches depending on their surroundings (though as consistently as possible). This can surely be done better, or at least differently. It would be interesting if we had a way to test how "optimal" a certain transcription is (with entropy?).

Thank you, Koen! It's nice to see the kind of experiments one can easily run with these systems. One must always be careful not to expect too much from automatic methods, but they at least provide an objective point of view.

I think that the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about the frequent dropping of initial o- in some phonetic contexts is quite convincing. According to your proposal, this would mean that the initial consonant switches from voiced to unvoiced in some contexts. I wonder if this is known to happen in some languages?

In particular, after -in, -iin, -r an initial o- seems to be required (or at least very strongly preferred). If those endings are consonants, I find it easy to imagine that a vowel must follow. I don't know if a voiced / unvoiced alteration would make the sequence easier to pronounce. I am certainly biased by the frequent dropping of the final vowel before an initial vowel in Italian: della ora becomes dell'ora, questo anno becomes quest'anno etc.