Re: CHAT: feckly off-topic (was: THEORY: Storage Vs. Computation)

On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Nik Taylor wrote:

> Sally Caves wrote:
> > Several people have commented on my "user unfriendly" spelling of
> > Teonaht;
> > someone told me it was "counter-productive" to make "th" into "ht," and
> > "y" /j/ into "u,"
>
> Well, those certainly are *odd* transliterations ...
>
> But anyway, when I see Teonaht, I feel rather less guilty about my own
> transcription.  I mean, <ty> for /tS/ isn't that strange, especially not
> compared to {u} for /j/!
I'm not sure why everyone is so bothered by <u> for [j]. Both <u> and
<y> ultimately come from Greek <upsilon>, which in Greek was originally
pronounced [u], was then fronted to [y] (!), and then unrounded to [i]
in the modern language. A very nice set of sound changes, if you ask me,
and perfectly plausible as the source for exactly the kind of
transcription that Sally used in Teonaht. (As a matter of fact, one of
the many ways in which Modern Greeks write [i] is with <upsilon>; i.e.,
<u>.)

I also kind of like the <h> before the stop to indicate the fricative.
In the practical orthography which is used by the Western Shoshone and
Gosiutes, the combination <hC> (where C is any one of <p>, <t>, <ts>,
<k>, or <kw>) is always a voiceless fricative. This has more to do with
the particulars of the Shoshone sound system, but the Shoshones who are
literate seem to manage just fine, even if they were English-literate
before they were Shoshone-literate.

BTW, someone just asked for inexpensive Shoshone materials. Alas, there
is no such thing. There is a grammar of Western Shoshone which has been
published by the Anthropology Dept at Boise State University (Idaho);
it's only about $25. The only other commercially available grammar of
Shoshone is a sketch of the Gosiute dialect which appeared in vol 17 of
the Handbook of American Indians, published by the Smithsonian. I'm sure
that the volume is well over $100, and I wouldn't be surprised if it
were closer to $200. They price these things so that only large
university libraries can afford to buy them, and with shrinking library
budgets there, lots of them don't even want to bother (how much use do
*you* think a grammatical sketch of Shoshone is going to get?). Anyway,
I feel a rant coming on so I'll stop. There is a website for Shoshone
hosted by Idaho State University; not much grammar, but there is a
rundown of their writing system (which is different from the Western
Shoshone and Gosiute systems) and the numbers from 1-1000. I don't have
the URL handy, but an enterprising individual shouldn't have trouble
getting to it.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu                   "All grammars leak."
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~elzinga/                 -Edward Sapir