Re: [Choctaw -- I forgot to add a subject last time]

At 6/3/00 08:06 PM -0500, you wrote:

>It's on the web as a facsimile of a printed document, a .gif I think... but
>I lost it!  I'll have to send you the file.
>
>It's not a "certified" copy because it has a lot of typos (the v-vowel is
>italicized, but so are adjacent l's, and c appears where v should in a
>couple places, etc.
>
>I'll send you the picture file immediately after this post.
Thanks

 the sequence
>><ie>
>>would be phonetically [ii:] (short i followed by long i).  Hard to see that
>>as
>>a real pronunciation.
>
>Are you sure you're not thinking in Chickasaw vowel phonology?
Positive.  As I type this I have a dissertation on Choctaw open on my lap.
Also, I have never seen Chickasaw written with an <e>, so I don't know what I
would be confusing.

I found this phrase on the Choctaw Nation web page:

E-hachi Pisachike  'We will all see you'

In the orthography I'm used to, this would be iihachipisaachikii, segmented
as:

ii - we
hachi - you (pl)
pis - see
aachi - future tense (don't know why it's short a here.)
kii - not sure about this one, but it is very close to -okiih which is an
emphatic suffix.  The meaning seems to fit well.  I would expect the /o/ to
drop following a vowel (IIRC V1V2 often, but not always, reduces to V1), and
perhaps the /h/ is just not written.  Final /h/ is a difficult matter in
Choctaw and Chickasaw anyways.

It is clear to me that <e> is being used for /ii/ here.

The dissertation gives the following phoneme inventory for Choctaw (in the
orthography of "UCLA Muskogeanists"): a, aa, a [nasa a], b, ch, f, h, i, ii, i
[nasal i], k, l, lh [lateral fricative], m, n, o, oo, o [nasal o], p, s, t, w,
y.

This should help you with your orthography project.

  The data on
>Choctaw I got has /e/ and /i/ listed in given pronunciation, and this came
>from a list of common words/phrases on Choctaw Nation pages.  There are
>sound files somewhere.
I don't know about Choctaw, but at least in Chickasaw it is common for short
vowels to be pronounced lax.  For example, /i/ can be either [i] or [I]
(always
the former when in the accented syllable).

>It's just not as easy to find a lot of data on a language spoken by
>thousands instead of millions...
Muskogean languages just don't show up much in print -- every article I've
ever
even seen a reference to on Chickasaw was written either by my advisor (Pamela
Munro) or one of her students.  (There's probably something by Stephen
Anderson
out there somewhere, but I've yet to see it.)

Marcus