Catawba vowels.

[Rankin, Robert L]

Blair,
 
Thanks for that.  Lack of a u/o contrast explains the variability nicely.  The Catawba evidence is very important as it shows that the Mandan (and now Tutelo) forms aren't just a fluke or descended from *?uN-.
 
Bob

________________________________

From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu on behalf of BARudes at aol.com
Sent: Thu 12/22/2005 4:02 PM
To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: Re: Tutelo 1st dual/plural forms.


Everyone - i.e. Gatschet, Speck, Michelson, Swadesh, Swanton, McDavid, Siebert - made serious transcription errors in recording Catawba vowels and citing forms from any source without carefull philological analysis and comparison with other sources can be misleading. Speck, McDavid, and Siebert all worked with with Sally Gordon; she was McDavid's sole consultant and Speck's and Siebert's primary consultant.

Catawba has a total of twelve vowel phonemes, which are grouped in three sets: (1) short oral - /i e a u/, (2) long oral - /i: e: a: u:/, and (3) nasal (which are non-distinctively long) - /iN eN aN uN/. The short oral vowel /u/ appears as phonetic [u] when stressed and as a centralized rounded vowel when unstressed. The long oral vowel /u:/ appears as [o:] when stressed and as [u] when unstressed. So there is a phonetic contrast between [u] (phonemic /u/) and [o:] (phonemic /u:). The phoneme /uN/ can appear as phonetic [oN], but so can phoneme /aN/. And many of the research also wrote phonetic [cN] (nasal open-o, the result of a phonetic contraction) as [oN]. So, the first person plural morphemes nu an du: could appear phonetically as [nu] and [do:], but neither contains a nasal vowel.

Blair