CW phonology

[Sally Thomason]

Henry Zenk refers to my 1983 paper in Language on CJ (or CW...
sorry if habit makes me use the older Chinook Jargon instead of
Chinook Wawa) and its evidence for systematic phonological
structure of the language, and he mentions that the 1981 Salish
Conference version of that paper had the supporting phonetic data,
but the 1983 publication didn't.  I don't remember for sure now,
but I think maybe the journal editor balked at lengthening the paper
even more by including the comparative data list.  But also, some of
the data in that list came from unpublished work by Wayne Suttles,
and I didn't have his permission to publish it.  If I had that
permission, I could easily type up the data (that list pre-dated
my entry into the world of word-processing!) and send it to this list.
But he was hard to get in touch with even in the early 1980s, and I
have no idea how to do so now.  Does anyone else here know?

   As for minimal pairs: I'd put it much more strongly than Dave's
report of Linguist #1's view: minimal pairs are *never* needed
to prove that two sounds contrast and therefore must belong to
separate phonemes (capable of distinguishing words in the language,
like pat vs. bat in English).  This isn't a radical view at all;
it's the way it always was, in the pre-Chomsky days of American
descriptivist linguistics, and still is, for fieldworkers who
are doing primary language description.  The common fixation on
minimal pairs is due, I suspect, to the exigencies of teaching
beginning linguistics students -- minimal pairs are easy to get
across to that audience, but insisting on them is very misleading
in terms of both the history and the practice of linguistic
analysis.

   The way you establish a phonemic distinction and prove contrast
is to show that there is no *non*-contrastive distribution of the two
sounds.  There  are just two kinds of non-contrastive distribution:
(1) the two sounds never occur in the same environment (this is called
complementary distribution) -- for instance, maybe you have voiceless
stops like [p] and [t] at the beginning and end of words, but never between
vowels; and voiced stops occur only between vowels.  So you can put
[p] and [b] together into one phoneme, and [t] and [d] into another
phoneme.  (2) The two sounds occur in free variation -- that is,
you can replace one with another without changing the meaning of the
word.  English has an example in final stops like [p b t d]: at the
end of a word, you can release the stop or just hold it, so that it's an
unreleased stop.  For the [p] in _stop_, for instance, you can open your
lips after closing them for the [p] (releasing the stop), or you can just
keep your lips closed, so that the [p] is unreleased.  (There is a phonetic
symbol for this, but not in ASCII, sorry.)  Either way is fine; native speakers
do it both ways; and it's always the same word, _stop_, with the same meaning,
regardless of whether you release the p or not.

   So if you don't have *either* a pattern of complementary distribution
*or* free variation, your two sounds contrast, and must belong to
separate phonemes -- they are capable of distinguishing two words,
regardless of whether there are any minimal pairs or not.

   It's even worse for minimal pairs: they don't even always guarantee
a phonemic distinction.  Consider the composer's name _Bach_.  Some English
speakers pronounce this name with the vowel of _back_ but with the German
consonant, a fricative (like CW /x/).  People with that pronunciation have
a minimal pair in _Bach_ and _back_ -- they sound identical except for
the last consonant, [k] vs. [x].  But this doesn't mean that English has
a phoneme /x/: if this is the only example of [x] in the language, only
a completely mechanical analytic methodology would want to claim /x/ as
a phoneme; any sensible linguist would claim that [x] is an exception, outside
the basic phonological system.

   Sorry to be so wordy on this subject!  I've spent so much time trying
to disabuse students of the notion that minimal pairs are a beacon of
hope, one simple straightforward rule in the complicated process of figuring
out a phonological system, that the phrase "minimal pair" tends to trigger a
lecture.  But at least in email, one can always stop reading.

   Anyway, I don't think any experienced descriptive linguist will
have any trouble finding phonological distinctions in CW, although, as
Henry emphasizes, deciding what kind of CW to teach is a policy decision,
not a linguistic decision.  Among other things, significant differences between
modern elders' pronunciation of CW and the evidence from older sources must
inevitably influence that decision.

   -- Sally Thomason

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