Nahuatl and CJ [vowel length question]

[hzenk at PDX.EDU]

Can't resist putting $.25 or so of my own into this.

>
> Maybe the pairing we see is due to the so-called "tense versus lax"
> distinction that's traditional in describing English.  (Note: Tense vs. lax
> might not be phonologically justified, last I heard.)  I feel English has
> influenced the vowel system of CW enormously.
>

Jacobs (source of many forms in our CW dictionary) transcribed "bimodal" vowels
in CW AND other Oregon languages.  The high front vowel he wrote "i" is a good
example.  In his published "Texts in Chinook Jargon" he has only the symbol
"i".  But in his fieldtexts he distinguishes between [i] (usually long) and [I]
(usually short; written ipsalon).  E.g. take one of the more frequently
occurring words in the CW texts from Victoria Howard and John Hudson,  wik 'no,
not', wi:k (emphatic).  wik almost always appears as wIk in the field texts, vs.
wi:k (i not I).  This and like patterns for other vowels ([u:]:[U]=upsilon),
[a:]:[A]=caret) shouldn't be due to English influence.  On the other hand, if
WE prefer [wik] and feel that [wIk] sounds "funny", that probably IS due to
English influence.  My own sense from the oldest speakers I worked with is that
these "tense:lax" or "bimodal" vowel qualities can actually be quite elusive.
But our English-conditioned sensibility wants to peg them down--"reify" them,
if you will.  This is an issue that constantly comes up in the Chinuk Wawa
classes.

> But the tough part is that there are so few "words" in CW.  By which I mean
> there are only around 500 distinct morphemes -- though of course there are
> many times more words once you count combinations thereof that have
> nonpredictable or lexicalized~idiomatic meanings.  The small lexicon makes
> it difficult to find minimal pairs!
>

True, though there are some minimal pairs, as well as more near-minimal pairs.
Here's a good set (h=aspiration):

[kha] 'still, yet'
[qha] 'where'
[k'a7] '(be) quiet'

Here's a "pretty good" set (S=shibilant):

[pHuS] 'push'
[pus] 'if, suppose'
[p'us] 'cat'

The latter is maybe not as good as it looks here, in that [pHuS] has as an
alternate form [puS], and p'us has as an alternate form [phus]).


>
> -----And if we're taking certain distinctions on faith rather than on CW-
> internal evidence, aren't we now vulnerable to claims that CW has no
> phonological system of its own, or one which contains only underspecified
> archiphonemes?
>

Before we decide that CW has no phonology, I suggest we first go back and read
Sally Thomason's paper "Chinook Jargon in Areal and Historical Context"
(Language, 1983).  If you can, get her Salish Conference version of the same
title (1981?), which has her supporting phonetic data (omitted from the
published version).  Saying that, yes, I suppose we could teach CW, if not as
it appears in the old English orthography "Chinook" dictionaries, at least in
the more English-eroded form of the most recent elder speakers.  We would lose
the velar:uvular distinction, and ejectives might be hard to maintain too.
Hey, we would still have those barred-l's and [x]'s to teach though! That would
have to take some wind out of our sails, because one of the inducements we hold
out to people for studying Chinuk Wawa is that it makes a splendid introduction
to the sounds of Northwest languages ("it has almost all of the sounds
distinctive of Northwest languages," I can almost hear myself saying to one of
our classes).  Of course, our decision to teach CW the way we do is a policy
decision based not just on linguistic considerations.

Interesting discussion.  Henry Z.

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