LL-L "Orthography" 2005.10.30 (05) [E]

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   L O W L A N D S - L * 30 October 2005 * Volume 04
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From: Ian Pollock <ispollock at shaw.ca>
Subject: Orthography

> Yeah, that couldn't be closer to home, at least not geographically
> (here in an around Seattle).  But ... and there's a but, a riposte,
> here too ... I've long suspected that this is an orthographic problem
> also.  I'm under the impression that, due to stress-conditioned rules,
> a very large portion of vowels are devoiced.  Since most speakers of
> Western languages are unfamiliar with this, those that first put
> Salishan languages into script left out all those voiceless vowels.
> All those occurrences of superscipt "w" in Salishan indicate rounding
> of the preceding consonant(s), which in my book points to devoiced
> /u/.  I've closely listened to and watched the lip movements of
> speakers of Lushootseed, Skokomish Twana, and Samish, and I could
> swear they use voiceless vowels.

I have no experience with these languages at all, being rather a
greenhorn, but actually that seems quite plausible to me now that I
think about it. In general I think maybe the division between vowel and
consonant is actually more of a smooth gradient, although we like to
think that never the twain shall meet. We linguists should probably
always bear in mind that the world is squiggly and things rarely fall
into square categories. My favourite example in English is the word
"purplish". Just try telling me how many syllables it has. Two:
pur-plish? Naaah. Three: pur-ple-ish? Not quite that, either. Really, I
think the right answer is something like "two and a half". Perhaps you
can see a reflection of the hesitation over these two words among
native speakers in the fact that it is often misspelled as "purpleish".

-Ian Pollock

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Orthography

Oops!

Here's a postscript, Ian et al., talking about Salishan languages.

> I have no experience with these languages at all, being rather a
> greenhorn

Here you get a chance to listen to some, narrated in Lushootseed by a most 
delightful lady, Vi Hilbert 
(http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=7130):

Story about Lady Louse:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/audio/news/local/seattle_history/wav/lady_louse.wav
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/audio/news/local/seattle_history/mp3/lady_louse.mp3

About Chief Seattle:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/audio/news/local/seattle_history/wav/sealth.wav
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/audio/news/local/seattle_history/mp3/sealth.mp3

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron 

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