Winnebago accent.

[Rankin, Robert L]

I think an instrumental study of Winnebago accent would be really
interesting.  It looks very much as if earlier stages of most Siouan
languages had pitch rather than stress accent.  That is certainly still the
case to day in some of them (it's been fairly well-studied in Crow, for
example).  Pitch accent might well explain why a lot of the talented
amateurs of the 19th and 20th centuries had trouble marking it in a variety
of Siouan dialects.  Dorsey's Biloxi is a salient example of the problems.
It would be very important to determine exactly where conservative speakers
are placing accent on words.  Is it on the syllable or mora with the HIGHEST
pitch or on the syllable or more where the pitch DROPS?  There are a lot of
answers that we don't know.  I've always distrusted the ability of
instrumental phonetics to tell us very much about native speakers'
phonologies, simply because speakers "perceive" things that clearly are not
there and systematically fail to perceive things that demonstrably are
there.  But at least a good phonetic study will let us know what IS there,
whether or not it matches the phonological judgments of speakers.  I hope
you get some really clear and good results the rest of us can use.

Bob
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