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Re: THEORY: vocalic h/voiceless vowels

From:dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>
Date:Monday, February 7, 2000, 22:10
On Mon, 7 Feb 2000, Ed Heil wrote:

> Raymond Brown wrote: > > >I think that "syllabic [h]" would be a fair, if somewhat too vague, > > >description of the "unvoiced vowels" one sometimes finds in American > > >Indian languages. (One would also have to specify the quality of the > > >vowel to make the description at all adequate.) > > > > Do these unvoiced vowels act as centers of syllables? If they do, > > presumably they have some vocalic coloring (otherwise there'll be only one > > unvoiced vowel) which seems to me to be a little more than merely "syllabic > > [h]" > > Yes, they serve as centers of syllables. I don't know my IPA ASCII > well enough to transliterate the examples I have found in the > "voiceless vowels" section of the wonderful "IPA Help" Windows program > (does anybody still have the URL for the Web/RealAudio version?) but > the examples they give, from Comanche, Enga, Cuaiquer, and Malayo, > include voiceless turned omega, voiceless o, voiceless u, voiceless > barred i and voiceless i, the last two in minimal contrast in a single > language (Malayo). > > They do sound like vocalic h, but with appropriate vowel coloring > (which is very difficult for me to discern, but there. Perhaps it's > mostly there in its effect on surrounding segments, but it's there).
Having done extensive fieldwork on a language which has voiceless vowels (Gosiute Shoshone, closely related to Comanche), I can say that the quality and discernability of a voiceless vowel have everything to do with the quality of the voiced vowel it is derived from. The Gosiute vowel inventory is (where <y> represents a high central unrounded vowel): i y u e o a All of these vowels except for [e] can appear as voiceless, though voiceless [o] is rare. (There is a reason for the lack of voiceless [e], but that takes us too far afield.) I will represent voiceless versions of vowels using the corresponding capital letter; thus, voiceless [i] = [I]. The most easily discernable voiceless vowel is [A]; there is clearly a vocalic nucleus, and its quality is easily recoverable. A "hierarchy of discernability" can be constructed, which runs [A] > ([O] >) [U] > [I] > [Y]. The high vowel qualities are less distinct than the non-high vowel qualities, with [y] being very hard to hear. Also, the high vowels are not as clearly heard as syllabic nuclei. In at least one of my consultants' speech, etymological [Y] has been deleted word-finally following a voiceless stop, leaving only aspiration, and [I] is often apparent only in its fronting or palatalizing effect on a following consonant. In my dissertation, I analyzed voiceless vowels as being the result of assimilation of a following [+spread glottis] feature, which is realized in isolation as [h]. The assimilation of [+spread glottis] goes both directions; it devoices a preceding vowel, and it fricates a following voiceless stop. Thus, /haintsyh-pai/ 'I have a friend' becomes [haintSYPai] with voiceless [Y] and a voiceless bilabial fricative [P] both being the result of the assimilatory power of /h/ = [+spread glottis]. Dirk -- Dirk Elzinga dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu