The text of the Sigismund III sentence in the disputes of Kiev burghers with castle craftsmen about refusing them to participate in «munitio a conditio» of the city, the castle burghers under threat of a fine (500 kopecks of the Lithuanian hryvnas) forced to perform fortification works and participation in raising funds in the public order for the defense of the city is published. The decree was issued on February 28, 1622 in Warsaw in Polish. It was included in the collection of letters confirming the Magdeburg Law of Kyiv (from 1544 to 1659) by Polish rulers. Collection of privileges copied at the beginning of the XVIII century for the own needs of Burmese Koz’ma Krychevetc. It was translated from Polish and Latin into Ukrainian by sotnyks A. Trotcyna and M.Yagelnytskyi. The monumental book is stored in the Central State Historical Archive of Kyiv. In the article the linguistic features of the monumental book on the graphic, phonetic and morphological levels are analyzed. Variants in writing that are caused by the written tradition of that time, the lack of normalization of old and new forms, the writers’ idiolect and the influence of Polish and, less often, the Church Slavonic language. The vocabulary has been characterized from the point of view of its origin, the presence of a large number of Polonisms, Latinisms and Germanisms has been noted. In the text translators often used words-doublets and synonyms for clarification of a number of concepts.

Chinese is a tonal language, which differentiates it from non-tonal languages in the Western countries. A Chinese character consists of an initial, a final, and a tone. In the present study, the effects of noise and reverberation on the Chinese syllable, initial, final, and tone identification in rooms were investigated by using simulated binaural impulse responses through auralization method. The results show that the syllable identification score is the lowest, the tone identification score is the highest, and the initial identification scores are lower than those of the final identification under the same reverberation time and signal-to-noise ratio condition. The Chinese syllable, initial, and final identification scores increase with the increase of signal-to-noise ratio and decrease of the reverberation time. The noise and reverberation have insignificant effects on the Chinese tone identification scores under most room acoustical environments. The statistical relationship between the Chinese syllable articulation and phoneme articulation had been experimentally proved under different noise and reverberation conditions in simulated rooms.

The paper presents an analysis of the voicing of the phoneme /v/ in modern spoken Macedonian. The phoneme /v/ in the standard Macedonian language is classifi ed as a fricative, but some of its characteristics separate it from the other phonemes in this group. This is due to the fact that this phoneme was once a sonorant. In a part of the Macedonian dialects this phoneme is pronounced with marked voicing to this day. This phenomenon is then refl ected in the pronunciation of standard Macedonian. Our analysis is based on a selected corpus of examples that have been spoken by speakers from various dialect origins, in order to assess the any differences in pronouncing of the phoneme /v/ when placed in different phoneme contexts in the word.

The goal of this research is to find a set of acoustic parameters that are related to differences between Polish and Lithuanian language consonants. In order to identify these differences, an acoustic analysis is performed, and the phoneme sounds are described as the vectors of acoustic parameters. Parameters known from the speech domain as well as those from the music information retrieval area are employed. These parameters are time- and frequency-domain descriptors. English language as an auxiliary language is used in the experiments. In the first part of the experiments, an analysis of Lithuanian and Polish language samples is carried out, features are extracted, and the most discriminating ones are determined. In the second part of the experiments, automatic classification of Lithuanian/English, Polish/English, and Lithuanian/Polish phonemes is performed.

The present paper deals with the synchronic variation of the phoneme /ʁ/ in the unstressed word final syllable onset in modern German spontaneous speech. Our research task was to determine the phonetic context, in which the phoneme /ʁ/ undergoes modifications in the above-mentioned position and to establish, whether the intensity and the type of modifications (vocalization or elision of the phoneme /ʁ/) could correlate with the part of speech and with the combinatorial conditions of sound realization. The data collected are based on the acoustic analysis of spontaneous speech (interviews in the media) of 20 German scientists (10 men and 10 women) from the Central and Southern Germany. Our results showed that the phoneme /ʁ/ undergoes intense modifications mainly in the word final position "stressed long vowel + ʁ + schwa vowel + nasal" in various parts of speech: verbs, plural forms of nouns, adjectives, participles, substantivized verbs, possessive pronouns and prepositions.
The type of modification of the phoneme /ʁ/ in the relevant position correlates with the sound context. After high and mid vowels [iː], [yː], [uː], [eː], [ɛː], [øː], [oː] vowel realizations as unsyllabic [ɐ̯] clearly dominate over the consonantal as [ʁ], leading to the emergence of centralizing secondary diphthongs [iːɐ̯], [yːɐ̯], [uːɐ̯], [eːɐ̯], [ɛːɐ̯], [øːɐ̯], [oːɐ̯]. In the position after the long [aː] an elision of the allophones of the phoneme /ʁ/ is predominant, which can lead to an overlong articulation of the preceding low vowel as [aːː].

The article is devoted to the problem of voice signals recognition means introduction in the system of distance learning. The results of the conducted research determine the prospects of neural network means of phoneme recognition. It is also shown that the main difficulties of creation of the neural network model, intended for recognition of phonemes in the system of distance learning, are connected with the uncertain duration of a phoneme-like element. Due to this reason for recognition of phonemes, it is impossible to use the most effective type of neural network model on the basis of a multilayered perceptron, at which the number of input parameters is a fixed value. To mitigate this shortcoming, the procedure, allowing to transform the non-stationary digitized voice signal to the fixed quantity of mel-cepstral coefficients, which are the basis for calculation of input parameters of the neural network model, is developed. In contrast to the known ones, the possibility of linear scaling of phoneme-like elements is available in the procedure. The number of computer experiments confirmed expediency of the fact that the use of the offered coding procedure of input parameters provides the acceptable accuracy of neural network recognition of phonemes under near-natural conditions of the distance learning system. Moreover, the prospects of further research in the field of development of neural network means of phoneme recognition of a voice signal in the system of distance learning is connected with an increase in admissible noise level. Besides, the adaptation of the offered procedure to various natural languages, as well as to other applied tasks, for instance, a problem of biometric authentication in the banking sector, is also of great interest.