tlahtoa / saltillo

[Mary Clayton]

Galen,
     I think you've given an admirable account of the concept of
phonemes and allophones. I think that the 'disagreement' here may actually
involve an unstated assumption, which doesn't directly involve 'fact', but
(as is usual in linguistics at all levels of analysis -- even phonetics)
*interpretation* of fact.
     I think that the question that one would need to ask is: Is there any
*third* way for words to end [that don't end in other consonants, of
course]? That is, do the h and the glottal stop form a three-way contrast
with a simple final vowel which is followed by NEITHER of these? Because a
(not unreasonable) linguistic assumption might be that one of these is
distinctive (as are other consonants) while the other just marks its
absence, that is, just draws special attention to the fact that the word
in question ends in a vowel rather than glottal stop (or h, depending on
which way you want to argue). Seen this way, the question would be: Can
words end in
      -h,
      -? ( = glottal stop)
      -C ( = any consonant other than glottal stop)
      or -V (= any vowel)?

Or are the choices just
      -h and -V as "allophones"
      -?
      -C

or    -? and -V as "allophones"
      -h
      -C

     Most people take a historical position on this question, calling the
[historical] glottal stop a 'glottal stop' or 'saltillo' regardless of
whether it is pronounced as [h] or [?] in the dialect in question.
Whichever the pronunciation, this segment shows up in the morphologically
expected places, which is one reason to keep the name the same even
thought the pronunciation of presnest-day dialects may differ.
     A way to 'explain' the modern distribution of sounds for those
dialects which have  *real* glottal stops in the singular is that
the *historical* glottal stop has > [h], and the *new* glottal stop just
signals its absence. Taken too literally, this sounds like double-talk, of
course: [?] = nothing and [h] = glottal stop, but it's a natural way of
thinking for people who work with both classical and modern.


     Let me mention two personal observations which are relevant to the
issue, and certainly don't make it any simpler:

     -- One of Joe's young friends (from Oapan) who is heavily
Nahuatl-dominant, when speaking Spanish very frequently ends vowel-final
words with a glottal stop. Spanish "si/" is [si?] and "no" is [no?]. I
don't think he's exceptional. He's just the one I've heard the most (on
tape -- his tapes frequently accompany us on car trips.)

     -- There is a characteristic of general Mexican Spanish which may
play a part in the confusion. I'm talking about Mexican speakers who know
no Nahuatl, many of whom have probably had little or no exposure to it. My
Caribbean-hearing ear (I'm from Tampa and grew up around Cuban-type
Spanish) hears enough trailing-off of voice at the end of vowel-final
words in Mexican Spanish to qualify them for -s final words in Cuban.
That is to say, many pronunciations of singular nouns would be heard as
plurals by people who turn s > h, and third-singular verbs sound like
tu-forms.  But Mexicans don't *mean* or *intend* this 'aspiration', it's
just the way they frequently pronounce vowels in final positions.
     This may well influence the way 'outsiders' who are very familiar
with Mexican Spanish, whether native spekers or not, perceive final vowels
or final -h's in Nahuatl. I'll stop short of speculating what effect it
may have on Nahuatl speakers.


Mary

On Thu, 10 Feb 2000 brokawg at mail.lafayette.edu wrote:

>
> John,
> I have to respectfully disagree. The linguistic terms you refer to are
> phoneme and allophone. The phoneme is the phonetic element which may have
> various allophones depending on the environment. In Spanish, for example,
> the phoneme /n/ is pronounced one way when it is intervocalic and another
> when it is followed by a [g] or [c] and another when followed by [t], etc.
> The way you determine whether or not two sounds are separate phonemes or
> allophones of the same phoneme is to try and find two different words that
> are exactly the same except for the two sounds in question. If two such
> words exist, then the sounds are separate phonemes. I don't have enough
> experience to be able to make judgments about all modern dialects of
> Nahuatl, but my impression is that the aspiration and the glottal stop are
> two separate phonemes. I would support this by providing a contrastive
> pair of words consisting of the singular and plural of the indicative.
> Now, John, I know that you disagree that the singular ending of the
> indicative is a glottal stop. It is tough to argue these kind of things
> over email without the benefit of speech, and you have more access to
> native informants than I do, but I still think that what you describe as a
> closing off of the throat is a glottal stop. And I disagree that all words
> in any language must end by closing off the throat. In English when we
> pronounce a word that ends in a vowel, we don't close off the throat at
> the end. The word "go" for example doesn't end by abruptly interrupting
> the vibration of the vocal chords by closing off the throat. The vocal
> chords just quit vibrating and we cease to expel air. Glottal stop is
> defined precisely as a closing off of the throat using the glottis and
> consequently an abrupt stopping of vocal chord vibration. The native
> speaker with whom I have had experience had a very clear glottal stop at
> the end of verbs in the indicative singular. The difficulty I had was in
> determining if there was an aspiration at the end of the plural or not. I
> like to think there was a faint aspiration just as you have noted in the
> speech of Huastecan Nahuatl. So, if this is the case, then we have a
> contrastive pair in the third person singular and third person plural
> indicative verbs such as quicua [kwa?] and quicuah [kwah] where the
> [?]=3Dglottal stop. (The phonetic symbol is actually an upside down questio=
> n
> mark with no dot, but I can't make that go through on the email.) I
> conclude therefore that the glottal stop and the aspiration are two
> separate phonemes.
> I submit this argument humbly and ask any of the professional linguists to
> correct my reasoning if it is flawed.
> Galen=20