a phonetic mystery

[Pamela Munro]

I can't speak to the historical issue here, but I think there is a good
reason why we might hear a difference between mní 'water' and mnínkte
(as I would write it) 'I will go'. The vowel after the mn in 'water'
seems to me to be a derived nasal vowel that acquires its nasality from
the preceding nasal consonant, while the vowel after the mn in 'I will
go' is an underlyingly nasal vowel (the future of every ablaut verb ends
in -inkta/e, regardless of what consonant precedes). In fact, it's this
underlying nasality that causes the expected bl- of 'I will go' to
become mn- (which doesn't seem to happen for the relatively younger
speaker I'm currently working with, which is why I don't have any clear
intuition for David's particular perception question).

I know that in Assiniboine and elsewhere there's suppposed to be a
contrast between oral and nasal vowels after nasal consonants in
underived environments (which the above isn't); I personally haven't
observed this in Lakhota (and nor, I believe, did anyone in the field
methods class that I taught two years ago, which included many
phoneticians far more instrumentally sophisticated than I am).

I hope this naive observation is helpful. I'm just a lurking groupie.

Pam Munro



ROOD DAVID S wrote:
>
> Dear Bob and everyone else,
>         I would like confirmation of the following from others who listen
> to Lakhota, but I hear a contrast between mni 'water', with an oral vowel,
> and mniN kte 'I will go' with a nasal "i".  If that's the case, isn't
> there a problem with deriving the m-n of 'water' from *w-r+nasal?  I still
> think we have been far too sloppy in our listening to Lak. vowels after
> nasal consonants, but it would take a dedicated study to straighten it
> out, preferably one that uses instrumental phonetics and a variety of
> speakers from different places and age groups.  Until we do this, however,
> I think all our *w & *r reconstructions are suspect.
>         DAvid
>
> David S. Rood
> Dept. of Linguistics
> Univ. of Colorado
> Campus Box 295
> Boulder, CO 80309-0295
> USA
> rood at colorado.edu