Phonetic terminology (ekse Re: orthography)

[lilandbr at scn.org]

>On Sat, 25 Jul 1998, Liland Brajant ROS' wrote:
>> and phonetic terms in these tongues.  In other words, if I *were* =
trying=20
>> to express, say, "glottalized velar fricative" in Chinuk Wawa, or for =
that=20
>> matter in Spokane, how best might I do it? =20
>
>[Dave R. says:]  Personally, I'd just pronounce the sound, all by its
>lonesome.  Heck, I can't think of any languages in this region that have
>*freestanding* words just one sound long.  (There are *bound* words /
>morphemes that have only one sound, of course, but the point is that you
>can't say them by themselves.)  No speaker of npoqinis^cn / Spokane =
would
>take /p/ or /kw/ or /t/ as a word if that were all you said to 'em.
>Instead, I think, they'd just hear you making a single sound,
>meaninglessly.  In the Jargon you might be able to frame the sound by
>starting with the words "tenas wawa" or "uguk tenas dindin" etc. etc. =
etc. =20
>("That little sound...")

This might work okay if I (and my visitors) had sound files on my =
website,
but to date I don't (and many of them don't) and my pages are almost all=20
text-only, ASCII-limited, with a view to being readable by those (among=20
whom I am often numbered) using text-only browsers.  Since most of those=20
visiting my site are expected to be literate in Esperanto, I am providing=
=20
Esperanto descriptions of Lushootseed sounds.  I would be happy to=20
provide Lushootseed and/or Chinuk-Wawa *descriptions*, too, but I'm not=20
competent to do so (yet).

Incidentally, to what extent is glottalization phonemically distinctive=20
in CJ?  I assume that most non-Native CJ speakers 100-150 years ago did=20
*not* glottalize consonants in CJ in a way consistent with the Chinookan,=
=20
Wakashan and Salishan source languages for given lexemes.  My question is=
=20
to what extent this failure (too judgmental a word) would/could have=20
interfered with their being understood by speakers who knew where and=20
when to close their throats.  I guess I'm looking for contrastive pairs.

Liland

--
 Liland Brajant Ros' * UEA-D, Seatlo Usono * FD Baptismo, AA, US-lit-ro
 204 N 39th St / Seattle WA 98103 Usono | tel 206-633-2434  /  Lernu la=20
    anglan -- la mikrosofta lingvo!  Cxiu jam parolas gxin!  / ;-{
Vizitu La Lilandejon : http://www.scn.org/~lilandbr/ (some English,too!)