upsurge

[Richard Smith]

Natasha,
tizamêh (i am thankful) for your great great response
I feel now there are people who truly understand,and it is assuring.
and I so appreciate this forum to express such highly specific concerns.
and i know exactly what you mean by a linguists being TOO good a
phonetician,  
writing even the buzz coming from the closed mouth before a words even
spoken    as    "nde" "ngy"
sometimes shown as lower case letters to create that "pre-sound"
which creates a choice that should  be discussed and decided on
by an actual language committee...not a sole linguist.

I think your work in harmony with the Mutsun community
is the way to go and your obvious flexibility to "bend" with the people
even against your own original "prescriptions" is what we need from
linguists who should be assisting living people groups towards the health of
their culture almost as medical health care workers come to assist .
 
Originally our recent linguist was given a pretty open road
 "the heart stopped!----fix it!"
and i really can't over emphasize the fact that he has done a tremendous job
working with what he has...but the heart was pounded to beat again,
and it is now time for the body to start it's own heart rhythms
with the doctors assistance and consultation.
Natasha,
may i share parts of your response with our Wendat language group?

Richard


On 9/20/07 1:33 AM, "Natasha L Warner" <nwarner at U.ARIZONA.EDU> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> this discussion about which pronunciation information one can get from who
> has been really interesting.  I'd like to share another example.
> 
> I work with the Mutsun (Costanoan, California) community.  The last fluent
> speaker of Mutsun died in 1930, so it's a dormant language.  (We don't use
> "extinct" or "dead.")  The community has been working on revitalizing the
> language from the archival records of it since about 1996, and I've been
> working with them since 1997, and some additional linguists have now
> joined me.  I'm an outside linguist, not a community member, and much as
> we would like to change this, there aren't any community members who have
> had the chance to become trained linguists so far.  (Quirina Luna, the
> first language leader in the community, is becoming an excellent
> informally trained linguist.)
> 
> The documentation of the language is entirely written, except possibly for
> a very few recordings of songs, which for several reasons aren't likely to
> help us much on pronunciation.  There is extensive written documentation,
> including several thousand pages of fieldnotes made by the linguist J.P.
> Harrington, working with the last fluent speaker, Ascension Solorsano, in
> 1929-1930.  There are a couple of earlier sources, including one from
> approximately 1815, when there were many fluent speakers.  J.P. Harrington
> is known from his other work to have been an excellent phonetician, and
> this skill is also evident in his Mutsun notes.  He gives very
> detailed information on pronunciation, and it's clear that he spent a
> great deal of his and Mrs. Solorsano's time and effort on clarifying
> exactly which sounds were in which words.
> 
> One thing we have focused on throughout our work is knowing the sources,
> each one:  knowing what can be trusted in which sources, and knowing what
> kinds of transcription mistakes are typical of which sources.  If
> Harrington tells us a word sounded a particular way, we trust him.  He
> also gives us information about Mrs. Solorsano, the last speaker, that
> leads us to believe she was exceptionally fluent for a last speaker.
> There were many words she didn't know from the earlier sources, but she
> seems to maintain phonological distinctions.  If the earlier sources use a
> particular transcription that looks suspicious, we know whether it's a
> likely mistake for that particular source or not:  we know which linguists
> or amateur linguists neutralized which distinctions based on influence
> from their native language (Spanish or English).  We also know which ones
> couldn't find a way to write certain sounds, even if they could hear them.
> (By "amateur linguists" here, I'm referring to people from outside the
> community, not Mutsun speakers, who happened to start writing down native
> languages, but weren't trained as linguists.  C. Hart Merriam gives us
> excellent information on plant and animal species word meanings, because
> he was trained as a naturalist, but his transcriptions are a disaster in
> terms of sounds.)
> 
> One problem is that Harrington was almost _too_ good a phonetician:  he
> often transcribes fine differences among sounds that weren't a distinctive
> or consistent part of the pronunciation of the word.  All speakers of all
> languages (including English) have variability:  one time you say the word
> "bat" with your vocal cords already vibrating before your lips open on the
> /b/, and the next time maybe you don't start your vocal cords vibrating
> until just after your lips open.  The difference isn't distinctive in
> English, so your listener doesn't even notice.  Harrington transcribed
> every production he heard in as much detail as he could.  In Mutsun, he
> uses about 6 different symbols for different kinds of /s/ or /S/-like
> sounds, but the language only has two that are distinct, and he also tells
> us they're usually much like English /s/ and /S/ (palatoalveolar
> fricative, I mean).  It's _very, very_ clear throughout the data that only
> those two are distinct in the language, and that those are the most
> typical realizations.  (The remaining other symbols he uses also don't
> seem to be predictable allophonic variation, they really do seem to be
> random variability.)  I think linguists sometimes forget that natural
> language does have a lot of random, free variation, as well as the
> systematic kinds we're used to looking for.  One result of his careful
> transcriptions is that one time, he may write /sii/ 'water' with one of
> the "s" symbols, and another time write the same word with a different
> symbol.  Sometimes community members trying to learn Mutsun from the
> records try so hard to get everything "right," and this can lead them to
> put a lot of effort into trying to learn six different sibilants, and
> memorize which word to use which one in, when on the very next page that
> information is likely to get contradicted, because it was free variation.
> 
> This is where lots of communication between the linguists and the
> community members gets really important.  Communication about what the
> community's goals are:  To maintain the distinctions of the language in
> one's own productive use of the language?  To create a simplified system
> that will be easier to learn?  To pronounce one word faithfully to the way
> an ancestor did one time, but not to try to speak on one's own?  And I
> think trust among the community members and linguists is important: trust
> that the linguists are paying attention to what the community's goals are,
> and trust that the linguists have the skills to know what they know as a
> secure fact about the language and what is unsure, and trust that the
> linguists will be honest about what they are or aren't sure of about the
> language.  In a dormant language situation, or an endangered language
> situation with recent language change, there will always be things that
> one can't be sure of about how the language was spoken before.  As Bill
> points out, there are things about the phonetics of English we still don't
> know, so it's likely that there will be some things one can't be sure of
> for any language no matter how good the documentation.  This means that
> linguists have to be able to say "I don't know how one should say that, it
> might be this way or it might be that way, and here's my best guess, and
> here's why I think that." It's also helpful if linguists can say "Yes, I'm
> sure that this is how this sound is, even though that other place in the
> notes says something different, and here's why I'm sure."  Richard, it
> does sound like some more of these kinds of consultation might be a good
> thing in your case.
> 
> In the case of Mutsun, the project was initiated by the community, and we
> linguists work _with_ the community.  We really do consult each other when
> decisions about which sounds to try to learn where, or how to write them,
> have to be made.  The first practical orthography for the language is one
> that a community language leader (Quirina Luna) and I developed together,
> making the decisions (reasonably much) together.  The practical
> orthography has been revised several times, most often at the instigation
> of the community.  A few years ago we did a major overhaul of the
> orthography, and that was not only motivated by the community, in fact,
> they came up with all the choices of the new symbols, and then ran them by
> us to see what we linguists thought of them.  We went with their choices,
> as far as I can remember, and I believe they were better choices than the
> ones I (a linguist) had come up with a few years earlier.  In this case,
> the community and the linguists have always been in total agreement about
> the importance of maintaining phonological distinctions the language had,
> and we are lucky that the documentation, when pooled across the various
> sources, is good enough to be pretty sure what the distinctions are.  But
> the most important part of this is that linguists and community members do
> consult with each other on these decisions.  (I agree with Bill, of
> course, that a community is free to choose to teach a language in some way
> that doesn't maintain distinctions if that's what they want.  The Mutsuns
> have wanted to maintain the distinctions.)
> 
> We've had a different experience with suprasegmentals (stress and
> intonation, in Mutsun) than with segments, though.  Even Harrington gives
> us very unclear and inconsistent information about stress.  A later source
> (Okrand) analyzed his data, and found a somewhat inconsistent pattern he
> described as a rule for where to put stress on a Mutsun word, but Okrand
> makes it clear that he isn't at all sure about it, and that the data isn't
> consistent at all.  We realized that pattern was extremely hard to learn,
> as it almost always puts stress in the opposite place from English, but we
> tried to teach it for a while in the community.  Then we realized (after
> consulting with linguists who specialize in stress) that the stress rule
> Okrand worked out probably can't be right, because it's pretty unlikely to
> occur in _any_ language of the world.  While that doesn't mean it's wrong,
> combined with Okrand's uncertainty about it, and Harrington's extremely
> inconsistent use of suprasegmental markings, _and_ the difficulty of
> learning it, we decided to stop trying to teach it, and let people put
> stress wherever they want, which will probably be based on English.
> Linguists and community members made this decision together.  We decided
> the slow-down to learning wasn't worth it in asking learners to try very
> hard to memorize something difficult, for every single word, that was
> probably not even right in the language.
> 
> We wrote about some of these issues recently, especially about imperfect
> learning of a dormant language, in an article in the first issue of the
> new Language Documentation and Conservation journal:
> 
> http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/June2007/
> 
> Finally, I want to reaffirm Bill's point about how people's knowledge of
> one language's sound system influences how they learn the distinctions of
> another language.  There has been a whole lot of research on this in
> phonetics during the last 10-15 years (not on endangered language
> learning, on bilingualism and language learning generally), so we now know
> a lot more about how either a linguist or a child or adult who is fluent
> in some language like English is influenced by the sound system of, for
> example, English, when they try to learn any other language.  Having the
> categories of one language makes it very hard to learn certain
> distinctions in another language.  This is true whether you're a linguist
> doing fieldwork or an adult or even a child learning a language in the
> community, _if_ you already speak some other language.  If you're a kid
> learning your heritage language as your first language, from fluent
> speakers, _and_ you don't have knowledge of the categories of any other
> language yet, then you don't have the problem, of course.  Having
> knowledge of some other language's categories doesn't make it impossible
> to learn the sound categories of a language, but it does make problems in
> getting sound categories right likely.
> 
> Thanks, everyone, for the interesting discussion.  Sorry for writing such
> a long reply.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Natasha Warner
> 
> 
******************************************************************************>
*
> Natasha Warner
> Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics
> University of Arizona
> PO Box 210028
> Tucson, AZ 85721-0028