happy news

[shokooh Ingham]

Dear Armik,
Tabrik arz mikonam.  I'm glad to hear that Lakota has a question intonation.  I always though it might have.  You might be able to solve another mystery for me which is 'is there a difference in intonation between wh- questions and open questions?' i.e. might it help to distinguish 'where are you going? and 'are you going somewhere?', that's presuming that you could use tokhiya ninkta he? for both and that they don't in fact use different words to distinguish the two.  In any case it would be interesting to know if they have difference intonations, as they do in English and also Persian, kuja miiri starting with a high tone on kuja 'where' and jaai miiri ending up high on miiri 'you go'.     Congratulations again.

Yours
Bruce

PS contributions from other Siouanists welcome.

--- On Wed, 1/12/10, ROOD DAVID S <David.Rood at Colorado.EDU> wrote:

> From: ROOD DAVID S <David.Rood at Colorado.EDU>
> Subject: happy news
> To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU
> Cc: "Armik Mirzayan" <mirzayan at me.com>
> Date: Wednesday, 1 December, 2010, 13:11
> 
> I am pleased to announce to everyone on this list that
> Armik Mirzayan just finished his dissertation on Lakota
> intonation and prosody.  It's been a long time in the
> works, but I am very proud of what he has done.  To me
> the most interesting finding is one that clarifies a
> long-standing mystery for me.  You may know that the
> question enclitic in Lakota is sentence-final /he/, and that
> the e-ablaut form of the continuous (is verb-ing) enclitic
> is also /he/, though that one is underlying /haN/. Speakers
> always seem to know whether a given sentence is a
> continuative declarative or a question, even though the
> enclitics are identical.  It turns out that questions
> have a different intonation pattern at the beginning of the
> sentence -- a question starts higher and often realizes the
> highest pitch slightly after the first stressed
> syllable.  I guess I never thought to listen to the
> beginning of utterance for the clue.
>     Of course there's a lot more, much of
> which is of interest to phoneticians and intonation
> specialists rather than just to Siouanists.
>     The work should be available from UMI on
> whatever schedule they manage.  Armik has lost his
> connection with this list due to some CU email address
> decision, but I've included his current email in this
> message if you want to write to him.
>     Best wishes,
>     David
> 
> 
> David S. Rood
> Dept. of Linguistics
> Univ. of Colorado
> 295 UCB
> Boulder, CO 80309-0295
> USA
> rood at colorado.edu
>