LL-L "Orthography" 2005.11.03 (13) [E]

Fri Nov 4 00:38:18 UTC 2005

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03 November 2005 * Volume 13
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From: Ian Pollock<ispollock at shaw.ca>
Subject: Orthography

>  From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
>  Subject: Orthography
>
> Yeah, that couldn't be closer to home, at least not geographically
> (here in an around Seattle).  But ... and there's a but, a riposte,
> here too ... I've long suspected that this is an orthographic problem
> also.  I'm under the impression that, due to stress-conditioned rules,
> a very large portion of vowels are devoiced.  Since most speakers of
> Western languages are unfamiliar with this, those that first put
> Salishan languages into script left out all those voiceless vowels.
> All those occurrences of superscipt "w" in Salishan indicate rounding
> of the preceding consonant(s), which in my book points to devoiced
> /u/.  I've closely listened to and watched the lip movements of
> speakers of Lushootseed, Skokomish Twana, and Samish, and I could
> swear they use voiceless vowels.  And I suspect the very same to be
> the case in several Caucasian language varieties that are likewise
> known for alleged vowel scarcity (and happen to share ejective
> consonants with the Salishan languages).
>
> Yes, vowels *can* be voiceless, absurd though this may appear.  In
> other words, they are whispered.  (When you whisper you actually use
> only voiceless vowels.)  The generally best known cases of vowel
> devoicing are in Japanese (e.g., /site/ _shite_ -> _shte_, /imasu/
> _imasu_ -> _imas_). Listen to ordinary speech in Portuguese of
> Portugal!  Most of the time you hear only the vowels of syllables with
> primary stress (although native speakers claim to hear all of them,
> while they may only *know* they are there); e.g., _desculpe_ sounding
> like _dshkuwp_ to our ears.
>
> Fortunately, we don't seem to have such a "problem" in the Lowlands
> area. Or do we?

I don't want to do too much dead horse flogging here, but it occurred
to me today that a good way of testing the hypothesis of voiceless
vowels would be to make speakers shout at each other. I have a feeling
*something* would come out.
For instance, in the wikipedia article on Nuxalk (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuxálk_language ) we luckily have a
translation of "go to shore": [q't] . (That's an uvular ejective, by
the way). Now, imagine if you will a man and his children are drowning
in the roaring ocean and he wants to tell them to go to shore. Picture
the conversation:
"Q't."
"Eh?"
"Q'T!"
"We can't hear you, dad!"
"QQQ''''''TTTTTT!!!!!"

Puh-leez.
-Ian Pollock, aka Tgdppqs.

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Orthography

Good'un, Ian!

Yeah, that wouldn't carry very far, would it?  Making a speaker shout would
indeed be a great test.  Someone had better do that test quick smart, before
the last 20-30 speakers are gone.

I had previously heard about Nuxálk (formerly "Bella-Coola") being an
extreme case even within a Salishan context (which is saying *something*),
hence a number of scientific articles about its syllable structure.
Example:

xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ [xɬp’χʷɬtɬpɬːskʷʦ’] 'he had had in his possession a
bunchberry plant' (!!!)

This is a problem with a given group of language varieties that are clearly
related to each other but are phonologically either extremely disparate or
extremely similar, language varieties that have been known to researchers
only for a short time and of which no significant historical records exist.

For example, if you look at the main indigenous Turkic varieties of China
(Uyghur, Salar and Yughur/Yellow Uyghur) and imagine they had never been
written until now (which is true of Salar and Yughur) you will get the words
[ʔç̍'kʲʰɪ] or [ʔɕ'̍kʲʰɪ] (SAMPA [?=C"k'_hI] ~ [?=s'"k'_hI]) for 'two',
[ʔɸʸʧ] (SAMPA [?=p\tS]) for 'three' and the word [ʔɸ'kʰa] (SAMPA [?=p\"k_ha]
for 'younger brother'.  So we seem to be dealing with syllabic consonants
here also, and you'd wonder how to write them, and, based on phonetic
information you are likely to write them as <ʔśki> ~ <'ski>, <ʔϕʸč> ~
<'fʸč>, and <ʔϕka> ~ <'fka> respectively.  This was the situation the
developers of writing systems for Salishan languages were in.  In the case
of Turkic, however, a clear picture emerges from a geographically very
far-flung language group (from the Balkans to Manchuria and Northeastern
Siberia) of which several members have been written for centuries.  So we
can compare and soon figure out that the common, underlying forms of the
above words are (or /?ikki/, /?üč/ and /?uka/ written <ikki> 'two', <üč>
'three' and <uka> 'younger brother' in related languages), that the
varieties in question apply rules of devoicing of unstressed vowels
between two voiceless consonants.

So, going back to the Nuxálk phrase, _xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc_, with sufficient
diachronic information it may well turn out to be advisable to write it like
this: <çalpixultalpalalskuc> (and I am just making this up) where we assume
devoiced vowels of which unrounded back ones cause velarization, high
unrounded ones cause palatalization, and rounded ones cause labialization.
In other words, I suspect that the current official orthographies for
Salishan are primarily phonetically based rather than phonemically based --
hence the extra scary-looking spelling.

Something of the sort -- albeit probably less extreme -- could have happened
in the Lowlands had there not been a writing tradition and in addition a
relatively intact dialect continuum.  However, also in the Lowlands area
similar problems exist in the case of minority languages that have been kept
outside the limelight for a long time and are being promoted by individuals
or organizations with little or no theoretical understanding of phonology,
hence "weird," pseudo-phonetic German-based spelling of Low Saxon dialects
creating more visual differences than there are phonological differences,
thus creating orthographic barriers where no barriers ought or need to
exist.  To some degree, this happens even in cases where there *are* written
traditions, such as writing in W. Frisian _-ch_ vs _-g-_ for the same
consonant (where <g> would be correct), and in Dutch writing _-s_ vs _-z-_
for the same phoneme (e.g., _lees!_ 'read!' vs _lezen_ 'to read').
[Whenever I bring this up, native or near-native speakers seem to consider
my objection absurd, but I assume that this is only because they grew up
with the inconsistencies or flaws and consider the more logical alternatives
inconceivable.]

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron 

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