Chiwere Popular Orthography

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 16 Apr 2001, Lance Foster wrote:

> You have a point, but for some letters that could be written as a
> single sound (say c for ch, or ñ for ny) are written two lettered,
> while the x could be kh and probably be more acceptable to the
> community (for some reason the x really sticks in their craw).

Well, Dakotanists used to use h plus some diacritic, e.g., h-overdot.  I'm
trying to remember if the Colorado System uses h-hacek.

> If it was going to be consistent I would say "ce" for "che", and "mañi" for
> "manyi", if I decided to stick with "x", to be consistent with the one
> sound=one letter.

> I think for a beginner-level the "kh" may be easier to deal with (I
> know some really want the hyphens but I put my foot down on that one).

The problem with stop + h combinations (ph, th, ch, kh) is that they are
the most natural way to write aspiration, which is essentially always a
factor in Mississippi Valley languages.

> One thing to support the "just make'em learn linguistic notation" is
> what do you do with the eng sound? "ng" is insufficient, as how does
> one differentiate shunge (SHOONG-ay) from shunge (SHOONG-gay)?

In cases like that you are pretty much driven to using the eng-character -
n with a j-tail.

> And then there is the nasal thing, with hi vs hin. In that case do I
> go with a superscript "n" which may be more understandable (if a bit
> sloppy) than the subscript hook (which I always dug) or the tilde over
> the "i" which looks really sloppy in the IPA font I just downloaded.

Either superscript n or the hook work for me.

> One more thing I gotta ask. It's been many years (about 1981) since I
> took linguistics, so what symbol is used to designate the "hm" sound
> (the one where you say "m" while breathing out through your nose?) Or
> the "hn" sound?

Siouanists mostly use hm and hn.

> And for IO, what is the best choice in the IPA fonts for the flapped
> r/l? For "pipe" I have seen rahnuwe, lahnuwe, and even danuwe! And for
> wori "relative", it is usually said/heard/spelled wodi!

It doesn't really matter, but I'd tend to pick r somewhat arbitarily.
There is a special charactger for it, but I don't think anyone but a
fanatic would use it in writing a phonemic system where it wasn't opposed
to some other r character.

Which brings up an interesting question. Except in a very few words that
have y for *y (sometimes written z^) IO merges *r and *y and *R as r.
I've sometimes wondered if *R might still really contrast with *r in IO,
leading to two contrasting r's that were everywhere being transcribed as
r.  In fact, the thing that made me wonder was the occasional d for *r.

JEK