Phonetics – Reading, writing and
pronouncing language
(Slide numbers refer to accompanying powerpoint.
SLIDE 1
I’m talking today about phonetics, which is the study of sound, and in particular the
sounds of human languages. But I am focusing mainly on the writing systems we
use to record sound.
You’ve probably heard it said that North American Indian languages were unwritten
before the Europeans came.
But this begs the question of what writing actually is.
SLIDE 2
Lone Dog’s Winter Count is one of thousands of examples of how North American
Indians used to record information. One advantage of this kind of writing is that it
crosses language boundaries. For more on Lone Dog’s Winter Count, see the
educational unit at
http://nmai.si.edu/sites/1/files/pdf/education/poster_lone_dog_final.pdf .
SLIDE 3
The difference btwn the kind of writing shown on Lone Dog’s Winter Count and
alphabetic writing like you see in Slide 3 – is that each symbol represents a SOUND.
For alphabets, each symbol represents a particular consonant (like h, m) or a vowel
(like u).
(Writing systems can also be syllabic (where each symbol represents a whole
syllable). Examples of syllabaries include Cherokee
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary and the Canadian Aboriginal
Syllabics used by Algonquian, Inuit and (formerly) Athabascan languages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics.)
The challenge you have before you as you explore these archives is to figure out
WHAT sounds are being represented by the symbols you see.
Some of you already have experience looking at archival materials, but others of you
may be seeing old handwritten documents for the first time You may be seeing
materials in several different alphabets, usually hand-written and often hard to
read. You’ll be seeing letters that might not be the same as English letters, and even
when they are the same letters they may be pronounced differently. By learning
how to pronounce what you see, you will give it the “breath of life.”
You might see something like this: (still on slide 3,
Hans Udall, Nisenan (a California language))
Study this page to see what you can find in it. A page like this has an enormous
amount of information. It’s not just the alphabetic letters – we’ll get to that in a
minute – but also a whole lot about the grammar, and the culture too.
Culture: about the succession of a headman (to son, but if he is deceased, then to
nephew, and if nephew is deceased, then to grandson.) It also tells us that the giving
of acorn is a ceremony that recognizes the new headman.
Grammar: The meaning is a little hard to figure out – because the English translation
is in Nisenan word order. So we learn something about word order, and also that it
looks like “when” in Nisenan is an ending on the word for die. Also note the various
instances of the word for “captain” (headman). By comparing the instances, you
find out a lot about word structure. Also, look at “son,” “grandson,” and “nephew”;
what do you think the mü- at the beginning and the –m at the end mean? And what
are the roots, then, for “son,” “grandson” and “nephew”?
And getting to the pronunciation –
You can see that although it’s written in something similar to the English alphabet, it
also has some letters that are different. (backwards c, u-umlaut, curly E (all
vowels)). There are also some seemingly weird letter combos, like tc, and some
accent marks.
The u-umlaut is the only sound of these three that isn’t actually an English sound –
it’s a front u. (illustrate.)
The curly E (the one that looks like a script capital E) sounds more or less like the e
in words like “pet,” “set”. But the lower case e is more like how Spanish speakers
say it, like “peso”.
SLIDE 4
The backwards c is also a vowel – not in California English, but those of you from the
east probably have it. How many of you say these two words differently?
(slide with cot and caught)
SLIDE 5
Next slide goes back to Nisenan
And those accent marks tell you which syllable of the word to say loudest or highest.
SLIDE 6
Now you would still have to figure what the letters that are like English sound like.
The spelling rules in these alphabets may be quite different from English. But we’ll
go over this a little later. Let’s go on to another example of things you might be
seeing:
SLIDE 7
Obispeño Chumash slide (Yak tityu tityu yak tilhini)
J.P. Harrington was a messy writer. But again, rich information on various levels,
and mysteries to solve.
What do you see? [underlining, Spanish, loan word and incorporation of loan word
into Chumash grammatical system, letters we didn’t see before]
Note that translations are in Spanish. The Southern Californians of the early 20th
century were speaking Spanish as their second language, and especially the elders at
that time knew no English. (In fact, Obispeño means “people who went to the
Mission San Luis Obispo.) The Spanish translates as “My husband taught the people
as an interpreter”. (earlier on in this page she was talking about how at the mission
her husband often did the mission teachings in Obispeño when the priest was gone.
Loan words – “interpreter”. This shows us how to take a loan word and use it with
Obispeño grammar. Note the Tš- prefix on “terprete” – if you were studying
Obispeño, you’d want to keep looking for this prefix on other words and trying to
figure out what it means.
There seem to be some letters we didn’t see in the last slide. (Refer to slide while
reading this paragraph.) We see a long s, a t-long s -- with Harrington you have to
get used to his writing – this letter which looks like a Y, on closer inspection it’s
another t-long s. Debbie and I had to call Kathryn Klar, foremost expert on
Harrington writing, to figure this out. She also reminded us that since the first Tlong s has a tall loop on the long s, and the second has a short loop on the long s,
they stand for different sounds – T-long loop stands for [č] (the “ch” sound), and Tshort loop stand for a palatal t (sort of a “ty” sound). We also asked her about the
script [š] preceded by t in the “interprete” loan word, especially because that symbol
(š) is hardly ever seen in Harrington’s writing. Klar said that this was at the very
beginning of his Obispeño work (as evidenced by the fact that it is on page 6 of Reel
1), and he was hearing some slight difference between that sound and the earlier Tlong s (with long loop) and wanted to indicated the difference. Later on he
abandoned the š and stuck with T-long s.
All this shows some of the interesting challenges that come up for understanding
what you see in these manuscripts.
SLIDE 8
So far, then, we’ve seen two different writing systems:
The Americanist system (Uldall on Nisenan) and the International Phonetic
Alphabet (Obispeño) (IPA).
(Harrington was educated in Europe, so he used IPA.)
They are a lot alike, but some of the symbols differ: (slide 8 compares some of the
differences between the two .)
One thing they both have in common is this: each symbol represents only one sound,
and each sound has one symbol.
SLIDE 9
“The one sound, one symbol” principle.
SLIDE 10
Although there are very many documents transcribed either in IPA or Americanist
systems, there are even more orthographies that people may have used. Spanishspeaking priests in the missions would use a kind of Spanish-based spelling; English
speaking people who were not linguists would use various systems of their own.
Shawnee
The slide shows 4 different ways Shawnee has been written (and there are more)
Lewis Cass, Governor of the old Southwest Territory, developed a system for general
use in writing all the languages in the Territory.
Thomas Wildcat Alford (Shawnee) developed another. Note that the “phonetic
symbols” column has almost a dozen vowels, while ‘Shawnee orthography” has only
4.
SLIDE 11
Wikipedia on Shawnee
(forget the table of consonants for the moment – just look at the vowels
Yet another system of representing vowels. The colon is one way of indicating a
long vowel.
SLIDE 12
And here’s the Wikipedia version added to the mix
I asked Eric and Roy if they write like any of these, and they say no (although they’ve
read these different ways)
The Shawnee slides show another conflicting principle about writing languages –
although we would say about both the main phonetic systems that you write what
you hear, different people hear different things. So while the so-called “Shawnee
system” wrote 4 different vowels, the IPA version on the Wikipedia page indicates
that vowels can be either short or long. (a colon after the vowel is one way ).
But the vowels may sound a little different from each other in more than length, and
the phonetic system on the comparison page shows the differing vowel qualities
that the person who wrote this heard.
So which is the best way to represent the sounds of Shawnee?
This is an important question, but let me say first that this question is not that
important for purposes of what you are doing here – because the fact is you will just
have to deal with all of them! Regardless of your favorite writing system, if you have
one, in order to make use of these archival materials, you have to learn to read the
writing systems that anyone used who wrote something on your language.
So what you might find yourself doing is making a table a lot like this one. And one
of your homework options tonight is to do just that…..
SLIDE 13
If you choose that homework option you’ll probably write your comparison set in
table form, and perhaps write them more or less in alphabetical order. But I showed
you this slide before that had consonants and vowels separated, and the consonants
were in this table form.
SLIDE 14 – Saggital section of the human head, also known as a “Sammy”
This shows the various points of articulation –
the lips are the point of articulation for “labial” sounds like [p];
the “alveolars” (like [t]) are the ones where the tip of the tongue touches or
nears the alveolar ridge ;
the “palatals” (like [č], written as “ch” in English) are where the tongue is
bunched up against or near the hard palate;
the “velars” (like [k]) are where the back of the tongue is against or near the
soft palate (velum).
The are also ‘uvulars’, ‘pharyngeals’ and ‘glottals’ in some languages,
progressively further back on the “Sammy”.
Marya demonstrated the uvular in Alutiiq, written in Alutiiq as “q”.
SLIDE 15 – Ejectives
Ejectives are “popping” sounds; Zeke illustrated ejectives in Lushootseed
Carson and Jeromi – ejectives in Tututni. John demonstrated ejectives in Keres.
SLIDE 16
tribes are now adopting their own writing systems, some of them even being
officially adopted by the tribal leadership. Lushootseed official system much like
linguists would write.
It’s not easy to come up with a writing system that everyone agrees with. It can get
very emotional, or political.
The Zapotec linguist who is visiting with Gabriela says that their writing system
took 20 years to agree on!
I’m going to end with a brief discussion of the evolution of one writing system:
TOLOWA, a Pacific Coast Athabascan language very closely related to Tututni.
SLIDE 17
UNIFON
SLIDE 18-19
HISTORY of Dee-ni alphabet
SLIDE 20 – sample symbols
SLIDE 21 – the Inuinaqtun Inuit writing system, telling me to STOP!