CJ phonemes -Reply

[Henry Kammler]

LaXayEm, Tony pi kanawi-Laksta

> I've been a little intimidated by the conversation here (I'm not exactly
> a linguisT), but I've got a few comments that will go back aways on this
> topic, so here it goes:
>
> Regarding aspects of our phonology that are phonemically distinctive.
>
> First much of the phonology of Chinook is not phonemically distinctive
> but is very important to its being "good ChInUk."

Yes, and it is good to write it like that because many people hardly ever
have the chance to listen fluent speakers of GR Chinook, so they can only
depend on the written form in order to learn it properly.

> Secondly, elements that I can think of being phonemically distinctive
> (off-hand) are aspiration:

Hey,  the following list you give is *really* interesting and exactly what I
had hoped for. But now you see me a bit intimidated because my knowledge of
CJ is too limited to figure out what the differences of the examples are.
Would you be so kind and provide translations / examples of use ?

> phus vs. pus (of course these have differnet root languages, but the
> distinction is important).
>
> glottalized/ejective:
>
> k!anawi vs. kanawi
>
> glottal stop can be:
>
> lulu vs. lu?lu  /  p!u? vs. p!u
>
> and as Sally noted stress is phonemically distinctive:
>
> kha'pa vs. khapa'  /  sku'-kum vs. sku-ku'm

> We are dealing with the issue of varying pronunciation systematically.
> We simply gather all the variant forms, compare them to the root and
> generally speaking it is easy to determine which we will consider our
> "primary  form."

Yep, that's probably the best way.

> Regarding our writing system.  We could undoubtedly write with a
> standard ASCII keyboard such as Henry's thought of 'dtu'wen.'  However,
> my general feeling is that it is nice to have an alphabet that looks, at
> least a little, different.  In other words we want something that looks
> more 'Indian' and less like English.

Good point. The Kwakwaka'wakw achieve this by only using two special glyphs:
the barred L (for the voiceless L, viz. "lateral fricative") and the raised
W (for rounding, viz. "labialization"). They don't write what's obvious, eg.
every unrounded K and G is phonetically /ky/ and /gy/. All other non-English
phonemes are represented by underlined standard ASCII glyphs (cannot be used
in 7bit email, though).
How do you write CJ when you are not confined to using the ASCII/email
keyboard? Do you use special characters?

Henry K.