"phute'okicu" (etymological enquiry)

[shokooh Ingham]

You're not alone Regina.  I have actually been told by a Lakota speaker of possibly a bit older than my generation that she could not tell the difference.  I think the point is that both are affricates and are similar.  However when I asked her to say icu 'take' and echun 'do', they were clearly different to me.  It isn't exactly the same, but I remember that when I taught articulatory phonetics I used to ask my students to write down in phonetic script what I would say.  Then I would pronounce /tliin tlodhs/ and they would all transcribe it as 'clean clothes', the point being that they wrote down what they thought I meant, tl- being an unrecognised sequence in English.  In fact I think you could pronounce all your cl- s as tl-s and no one would bat an eye-lid.  It isn't quite the same thing, but it illustrates that speakers impressions of what goes on in their own language are not always accurate.
Bruce

REGINA PUSTET <pustetrm at yahoo.com> wrote: OK Bruce, OK Jan, I consider myself outvoted on the aspiration of kic(h)u. Fact is, with c, I tend to have trouble hearing the difference between aspiration and lack of it. With p/t/k this is a lot easier. I'm sure there is a phonological explanation for this -- maybe the alveolar fricative that technically precedes the aspiration in the affricate c has something to do with it.
   
  Regina
  

Jan Ullrich <jfu at centrum.cz> wrote:
       
    
  REGINA PUSTET   wrote:
   
  >  ogle ki       kicu
  > shirt DEF give back
  > 'he returned the shirt to her'
   
  > he     kicu           we!
  > that   give back  imperative
  > 'give it back to him!'
   
  > I have transcribed the c in kicu as an unaspirated stop.  
   
   
  Regina, I have always heard ch (aspirated) in this word. Of course, the aspiration tends to be weaker at the end of long words, for instance when there are many personal affixes involved in verb, as in wichauNkichupi 'we gave it back to them'.
   
  Jan
   

           

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