Re: Ke'kh

On Tue, Sep 19, 2000 at 02:31:20PM -0600, dirk elzinga wrote:
> Hey.
>
> A little while ago, David reminisced about the days when we would
> exchange grammatical sketchlets and comment on each other's work. I
> also think back fondly to those times as well. However, the thought of
> working through a whole sketch -- no matter how concise -- seems a bit
> daunting, especially with RL time demands. So when T sent along his
> "fact of the day", I thought, "Here we go! This is what we need; a
> short, nifty grammatical point that won't take a long time to work
> through." So in an effort to encourage this kind of post, I thought
> I'd send along some comments.
Hehe, in fact, the reason I posted that was because of David's post :-)
And yes, I have seen posts that cover too many areas of a conlang which is
dauntingly long, and very intimidating to a beginner like me. So I
thought, better just post a short-and-sweet tidbit on my conlang, and do
it slowly so people have time to digest it.

[snip]
> The categorization of 'incidental', 'deliberative', and
> 'consequential' reminds me of the Salish feature of 'control', which
> encodes precisely the same kind of information. I've usually seen it
> as a basic two-way distinction, but there are reports of more finely
> articulated "control-space". Very nice! I also am a big fan of non-
> concatenative morphology a la Arabic/Hebrew, etc.
I'm still looking for a term to describe "incidental", "deliberative" and
"consequential". Right now, I'm calling it "focus", but perhaps "control"
is a better term? I dunno...

> A question about the transliteration. Do you also have voiced stops?
Yes

> If not, perhaps the transcription system could use those symbols for
> the plain voiceless stops; that way you could use the voiceless stop
> symbols for aspirates. Thus the Incidental Progressive <k3Ki'kh>
> becomes <g3ki'kh>. Or not. I've always felt it to be somehow inelegant
> to have to rely on capitalization for phonetic quality distinctions,
> but that's my personal preference.
Well, I hate having to use capital letters too... originally, I wanted to
use digraphs like kh, ph, th for aspirated stops, but I also had
fricatives which already use digraphs with `h', so I had use capital
letters instead, to compromise. (The fact that I have 27 consonants and 9
vowels to fit into a tight space of 26 Roman letters didn't help very
much, at all.)

[snip]
> > 1) Kuu'kh and Ku-u'kh differ only in the fact that the former has the long
> >    vowel u, while the latter has u split into two short vowels. The
> >    glottal stop is the only thing that differentiates between "to injure
> >    unintentionally" and "to injure deliberately"!
>
> This might also be creaky voice, or glottalization of the vowel rather
> than the splitting of a long vowel by a glottal stop. This is another
> cool feature.
*Embarrassed look* actually, the transliteration I gave was wrong. The
forms should be Kyy'kh (Kirsh /k<h>y:x/) and Kuy'kh (/k<h>u?yx/). The
vowel splitting does happen in another verb, though:
        Kr0's /k<h>*.Os/ (inceptive incidental)
        ---> Kru-u's /k<h>*.u?us/ (perfective deliberative)

The reason for this splitting is because there are no diphthongs in the
language. Well, some local names violate this rule, but "officially",
diphthongs aren't allowed. But anyway, this prohibition turns out to be
useful in distinguishing between these two forms :-)

> > 2) The sound of the word in each of its forms conveys its meaning (well,
> >    at least to me!) Especially if you pronounce K as the ejective /k'/
> >    instead of (merely) the aspirate /k<h>/, which is also a valid
> >    pronunciation of K. :-P
>
> Interesting. Aspiration and glottalization involve opposing laryngeal
> gestures: for aspiration the vocal folds are spread, while for
> glottalization they are held together while the larynx is raised. Yet
> both gestures can encode the same phonological distinction.
Well, /k<h>/ is how a native speaker would say it, but /k'/ will be heard
as an allophone.

> > 3) The accent marks (') indicate syllables of high pitch.
>
> So stress is realized primarily by high pitch? Or are stressed
> syllables louder than unstressed syllables as well?
Well, the rules are a little complicated, and still a bit sketchy in some
parts. But basically, the language has *both* loudness and pitch. Pitch is
used for normal, "unstressed" words; loudness is added at the "stress
syllable" (the ones marked with (')) when the speaker wishes to emphasize
that word.

As for the pitches themselves, the stress syllable (barring a few
exceptiosn) gets the highest pitch in a word, with other syllables at
lower relative pitch. There may be secondary high pitches if the word is a
compound word -- when forming a compound word, one of its components will
"dominate", and its stress syllable becomes the stress syllable of the
compound. The stress syllable of the other components will still retain
their higher pitch, but it will be lower than the "main" stress syllable.

When the stress syllable is on a long penultimate syllable, it's a "moving
pitch" -- it can be pronounced either as low-to-high, high-to-low, or
low-to-high-to-low. Unmarked syllables that don't have high pitch can be
at any pitch as long as they are lower than surrounding high pitches:
absolute pitch is not important; what's important is pitch contour.

[snip]
> been mentioned before. Or maybe I'll make something up. :-)
[snip]

Hehe, isn't that what conlanging is about? :-P


T