Re: Love Those Double Vowels (was: Diving In...)

Dear me, I knew the list was busy, but...! Hello, all - been having computer
issues, so a bit late responding to things...

SuomenkieliMaa said:

> Really must get to learn Greenlandic, as I love the
> looks of it! Doug, how are you picking it up --
> actually in Greenland? I wanted to go there in
> Jan2002, but due to lack of flights/time/money from
> Tokyo, I cannot.
Actually, it's not Greenlandic, Iqaluit is in Northern Canada, used to be
called Frobisher Bay (I think). And I'm way south and west of there in
Vancouver BC. I just love the Inuit language(s), is all - my study is
entirely due to the local library.

Inuktitut is a dialect chain that goes from Greenland to roughly the
Alaska/Yukon border. "Dialect chain" means a series of local dialects that
gradually change over distance. For example, if you have dialects A, B, C,
D, E, speakers of dialect B will understand speakers of dialect A and
dialect C, a little of dialect D, but little or none of dialect E. There's
no clear-cut "point of change," nor any one "received version" of the
language, just ... a chain.

Then D. Tse said:

> Ugh, you've got that CD too - the one where Utah
> Phillips duets with Ani DiFranco? I was so excited to
> buy it, as I'm a huge Ani fan, but totally
> disappointed when I heard it. Out of 20 songs, not
> one features Ani's wonderous voice...
> I admit, though, that Utah did make me chuckle in a
> couple of his songs. :-/
Actually, I like it - not for Ani, for Utah. Ani I like (love) on her own.

And David Peterson said:

<<Not quite, as you've got /a/ with /i:/. By the way,
would that glottal stop be the reason why Hawaii is
sometimes spelt as Hawai'i ?>>

Yes, but as I mentioned, I disagree with the practice. Since it's
impossible to have two like vowels next to each other without a glottal stop
inserted in between, why write an apostrophe? It just slows down writing.
There are glottal stops in the language between other vowels, so that you do
get minimal pairs. My favorite is with /au/. There is:

au [au]
a'u [a?u]
'au [?au]
'a'u [?a?u]

How they can tell that there's a glottal stop at the beginning of a
word without a preceding word is beyond me. Oh, and those four all mean
different things, but you're just going to have to trust me, since I'm away
from all my Hawaiian materials. ":D

Doug replies:

They can tell because the glottal stop is phonemic - it represents a k at an
earlier stage of the language, before the migrations or at least early
during them.

"The name of the picture/statue is 'Long Bay'" in Maori, Tahitian, and
Hawaiian respectively -

Maori: Ko Whangaroa te ingoa o te tiki.
Tahitian: 'O Fa'aroa te i'oa o te ti'i.
Hawaiian: 'O Hanaloa ka inoa o ke ki'i.

What happened was that early on k was devalued to a glottal stop. Then its
nasal correlate ng got dumped too - the Tahitians assimilated it to the
glottal stop, the Hawai'ians assimilated it to plain n. Then other stuff
happened - Hawaiian merged wh to h, but Tahitian kept it as f (mostly).

Then Hawaiian changed t to k (some old pronunciations of chanting still
apparently use t, and Ni'ihau dialect often dissimilates a series of k
sounds by pronouncing some as t) and r to l, which is *very* recent - the
first missionaries often write about the "dance called 'hura'."

Hawaiian also starts any utterance (i.e. from silence) with a glottal stop,
automatically. Like "alas!" which is "Au(w)e!" in all the Polynesian
languages I know of, whether they have a glottal stop or a k.

Transcriptions of Hawaiian that don't mark either long vowels or the glottal
stop are pretty limited in usefulness, really.

And then Josh Roth replied to Christophe about French:

> When I learned French in high school (in the US), my teacher made a big
deal
> about the difference beterrn /u/ and /y/, which I thought was obvious, but
> when I realized a couple of months ago that my dictionary also
distinguished
> between /a/ and /A/, and /2/ (o with a slash) and /9/ (o-e ligature), I
was
> shocked! It could be of course, that my French teachers did make the
> distinctions when they spoke but I just never noticed (and they certainly
> didn't point them out). I can pronounce all four sounds if I try, but if I
> just start speaking French, I don't even know which pronunciation to use
for
> which words - I'd have to look them all up. Is the /a/ vs. /A/ distinction
> gone in all dialects, and now that they have merged for you, which do you
> pronounce - are both of your examples above now /pat/ or /pAt/ ? And what
> about the /2/ vs. /9/ distinction - is that still made?
I speak a French somewhere between
good-standard-with-a-slight-Canadian-accent and
dear-god-what-forsaken-corner-of-the-bush-did-*that*-crawl-out-from Joual,
depending on company and circumstance.

Quebec French very definitely distinguishes /a/ and /A/. /A/ is often
diphthongized in colloquial speech - "garage" in hard dialect sounds almost
like /garAwZ/, a pathetic attempt at phonetics, by which I mean that the
vowel in the last syllable is almost an "ow" sound like in "now" (though not
quite). Sometimes in stressed environments where /A/ would be diphthongized,
/a/ becomes /A/.  You'll often see transcriptions of speech, like dialogue
in books, where they'll write stuff like "Canadâ," "çâ" and so on to show
the pronunciation.

I don't know the difference the dictionary means, but as I say them slowly,
words like "fleur" and "bleu" don't have the same vowel - "fleur" is more
open. Christophe?

Of course, Québecois is a dialect that pronounces "tu vas" as /tsu vA/, "je
suis" as /Syi/ or even just /Sy/ - "chuis" or "chus" or "j'su'" in
transcription - and mashes "je vais" into "m'as" /mA/ before another verb,
e.g. "je vais te dire quelque chose" "I'm going to tell you something" comes
out /mA t@ dzi:(r) ketSoz/. Terrifying. <grin>

And I find myself wondering of late what a language that marked emotional
content somewhat as Láadan does, only using Bantu-style classifiers,
combined with Philippine verb-focuses/triggers, well... what that language
might look/sound/be like?

I suppose this is how it starts...

Doug

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