Phonetics – Reading, writing and pronouncing language

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.

But this begs the question of what writing actually is.

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 .

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).

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.

Hans Udall, Nisenan (a California language))

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?

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:

What do you see? [underlining, Spanish, loan word and incorporation of loan word into Chumash grammatical system, letters we didn’t see before]

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.)

“The one sound, one symbol” principle.

Although there are very many documents transcribed either in IPA or Americanist systems, there are even more orthographies that people may have used. Spanish-speaking 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

UNIFON
SLIDE 18-19