This study investigates the phonetic structures of Lushootseed obstruents from archival recordings dating to the 1950s, and seeks to address the following questions: (i) Which acoustic dimensions characterize the stop, affricate, and fricative contrast in Lushootseed? (ii) which acoustic dimensions characterize ejective types in Lushootseed? and (iii) which methods can be used to characterize acoustic properties of Lushootseed obstruents from old archival recordings? Several acoustic measures were used on two elder speakers. These measurements include: Voice Onset Timing (VOT); closure duration; burst intensity for stops; dynamic measures of intensity for affricates; voice onset quality measures for stops and affricates, which include f0 perturbation, jitter perturbation, and amplitude characteristics of the following vowel; and spectral measurements for affricates and fricatives, which includes the frequency of the main peak at the low- and mid-frequency ranges (FreqM) and DCT coefficients. The findings reveal that several of these acoustic measures characterize the stop, affricate, and fricative contrast in Lushootseed.

In this article, it is argued that Hittite did not only possess a series of long ejective stops, as has previously been proposed, but that it also knew a series of short ejective stops. In this way, the Hittite stop system can be analysed as consisting of two types of stops, plain and ejective ones, with both types showing a length opposition: plain short /t/ vs. plain long /tː/, and ejective short /t’/ vs. ejective long /t’ː/.