Distinctiveness of aspiration; of voicing; & of V quality in CJ

[David Robertson]

LaXayEm, Klahowya, How are you?

A pleasing, thought-provoking note arrived in my email box from one of you
today. I'm answering it by posting a question to the group at large.

Put simply, if we take Grand Ro(u)nde Chinook Jargon, 1999, as a norm:

*Is aspiration phonemically distinctive?
	[For example, is there somewhere in the language a difference
	in meaning between 2 otherwise identical words, caused by the
	one having an aspirated consonant like /kh/ and the other having
	instead the plain counterpart ~ /k/?]

*Is voicing phonemically distinctive?
	[That is, are there really both a /p/ *and* a /b/ sound, etc?]

*Is vowel quality also distinctive, in cases like /e/ vs. /ey/, /i/ vs.
	/I/, and so on?

This has been discussed to some extent before.  Certainly Terrence Kaufman
and Sally Thomason have ideas on this.  My speculative opinion is that a
voicing opposition is certainly phonemic; that aspiration might not be;
and that vowel quality is likely distinctive.

I also tend to see CJ as having quite a lot of phonemes.  As the language
is one which absorbed only partially the features of any particular donor
language, and as it only recently was certainly a pidgin, CJ is very
likely to have a great many various sounds in it -- Sounds which have not
become regularized into a neat, traditional structure of oppositions and
symmetries such as one is taught in linguistics school to look for.

Furthermore the possibility of strictly normalizing even Grand Ronde CJ
may be a slightly remote one.  By this I mean to point out that there are
varying pronunciations for quite a lot of words.  I'm unsure what
principle would lead us to choose either /mILEt/ or /mILayt/ as the
'standard' form of <mitlite>, when we can simply record that both are much
used and understood, and perceived to be the same word.

By the way, I *strongly* feel that it's important to do what Tony does in
writing exactly how each CJ word is pronounced in his community.  However
that is a separate question from this one.

Let me cut this short here, saying that it would be most rewarding to see
some conversation about these points.  To my correspondent, keep up the
good work!

Best wishes,
Dave

PS:  Is /kyutan/ "horse" from Old Chinook?  Sorry for not going back
through the archives to find out...



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