Ich kann ihnen sagen... /nuschel
Thursday, 1 September 2011 13:19![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pneOne of them is particularly interesting for me as a native speaker of German, and perhaps for those of you who speak German, too:
Klaus Kohler [sic] [demonstrated] among other things that German listeners needed no more than the palatalization of a single segment n to hear kann Ihnen rather than just kann, deeply buried in the middle of a rapidly spoken colloquial sentence.
And I tried it myself and I think I can nearly reproduce that, at least for the speaking bit (harder to test the comprehension bit): kann is [kʰan] while kann Ihnen is [kʰanʲː]. (Not quite [kʰaɲː], I don’t think.) I can imagine that in rapid speech, the final length would get lost, leaving only the palatalisation.
...and here I thought German had no palatalisation! (True, it's phonetic only, not phonemic, but still: very interesting. To me, at least :D)
It also provides a lovely synchronic example of how segments can get lost while their ghost remains in the effect they have on the surrounding segments: similar thing occur in all sorts of areas such as umlaut, tone, or Greenlandic uvularisation. And also how this can cause phoneme splits if segments get lost, where the previously allophonic distinction (caused by the presence of the affecting segment) becomes phonemic when the segment drops entirely (as with Greenlandic vowels, where three phonemic vowels [six, if you count vowel length] split into six [twelve], once the uvular consonant got assimilated completely to a following consonant, forming a non-uvular geminate, while the vowel remained uvularised).
vowel phonemes in West Greenlandic
Date: Thursday, 1 September 2011 13:46 (UTC)So, the typical three /a i u/ vertices of the vowel triangle (no schwa, like Inuktitut but unlike some other Eskimo-Aleut languages), plus uvularised versions of those vowels.
In the orthography, the uvularisation is marked on the following consonant (sort of like how palatalised consonants are marked on the following vowel in Russian).
Before a single uvular consonant (voiced r /ʁ/ or voiceless q /q/), vowels are automatically uvularised, so there's no distinction there - but in geminates, you have, for example, arp [ɑpː] vs. app [apː] or ill [iɬː] vs erl [ɪɬː]. (Some consonants change pronunciation when geminated, e.g. /l/ = [l] but /lː/ = [ɬː].)
Here, the previous uvular consonant that assimilated completely to the following one is indicated by written r (except for qq, not *rq), regardless of the manner of articulation of the following consonant—like Nunavik Inuktitut but unlike Nunavut Inuktitut, which uses r or q depending on the MOA: r before [voiced] nasals and voiced stops/fricatives and q before unvoiced stops/fricatives.
On the other hand, in Inuktitut, r stands for either [ɴ] (before nasals) or [ʁ~ɢ] (before other voices consonants) while q stands for [q]; in Greenland, the situation might have been similar at an earlier point but nowadays, no consonant clusters are allowed and so the only thing that's relevant now is whether the first portion was uvular or not: not only the manner of articulation but also the place of articulation got assimilated so you only have geminates. (I think Labrador Inuit also has a fair bit of assimilation; probably less than modern standard Greenlandic, though, even if more than Nunavik/Nunavut Inuktitut.)
Note also that /i u/ are written e o, respectively, when uvularised—that is, before orthographic r or q—, making it look like a five-vowel system instead of a three-vowel or six-vowel one. I think that's got more to do with the number of vowel letters the Roman alphabet happened to have and less to do with keen insights into Greenlandic phonology. (Inuktitut also has different allophones before uvulars, but that's not reflected in the spelling any more than Arabic's altered vowel allophones in the environment of pharyngealised consonants.)
Note further that this six-vowel system is the analysis used in my German introduction to E-A. Wikipedia seems to consider the uvularised variants as allophones, and claims that /rp/ (for example) is pronounced [ʁp] rather than [pː].
But if my book is right, then rp rt rf rs rl /rp rt rv rs rl/ are pronounced identically to pp tt ff ss ll /pp tt vv ss ll/, respectively: [pː tː fː sː~ʃː ɬː], with the only difference being in the former vowel colouring, now phonemic vowel distinction.
(The spelling rf and ff for [fː] are also, I'm sure, due to the fact that the letter f happened to be there; no spelling changes are made for /ll gg rr/, even though the other geminate fricatives [ɬː çː χː] are also unvoiced compared their simple counterparts [l ɣ ʁ]. The exception is the fricative /s/, which is always unvoiced, whether single or geminate.)
It may be interesting that Wikipedia marks one consonant phoneme that is spelled with two letters: /ɴ/ rn. I think (but don't remember from the book) that this is probably phonetically geminate: [ɴː]. Interesting that here, the uvular changed the place of articulation of the following nasal to uvular as well (there's no simple [ɴ], I think, nor are there [n] preceded by uvularised vowels that could be represented by written rn). In Inuktitut, rn stands for the sequence [ɴn]. An example word in both languages with that spelling is arnaq "woman": /arnaq/ [ɑɴnɑq] in Inuktitut but /ɑɴɴɑq/(?) [ɑɴːɑq] in Greenlandic.
I suppose one could make a case for something like arfeq "whale" (Inuktitut spelling: arviq) being phonemically /arviq/ rather than /ɑvviq/—in which case, you'd have only the three vowel phonemes /a i u/. In that case, it's a matter of analysis of the phonology.
...that got rather long.
Re: vowel phonemes in West Greenlandic
Date: Thursday, 1 September 2011 14:03 (UTC)Yeah, I remember learning previously that both in Greenlandic and in older Latin-alphabet spellings of Canadian Inuktitut varieties, /i u/ were spelt with e and o before uvular consonants even though it wasn't writing a phonemic distinction, because the Latin alphabet had those letters available (and presumably also because the people who were adapting the alphabet for Inuktitut were not native speakers of Inuktitut, so heard those allophones as different and employed the available letters for them.) But it's new and interesting to me that they have actually become phonemicized in Greenlandic.
Re: vowel phonemes in West Greenlandic
Date: Thursday, 1 September 2011 14:38 (UTC)Yeah, I was talking mostly about the standardised spelling used for Baffin Inuktitut. I think that Inuinnaqtun sometimes uses e o, and I think Labrador still uses an orthography similar to the current Greenlandic one.
I think - but am not sure - that this was one of the earliest Romanisations; Kleinschmidt did quite a bit for the study of Inuit language, especially his native Greenlandic but also to some extent Labrador and other Canadian varieties, and his orthography was fairly influential in Canada even if it's been superseded by other orthographies in QC and NU.
And I have a bit of a soft spot for his orthography since—like Faroese, for example—it's a consciously etymological one, representing an earlier state of the language where fewer assimilations had taken place.
I'm sure it was hell to write ("was this 'aa' always an 'aa' or was it 'ai' or 'au' earlier and should, therefore, still be written that way?") but was, I believe, regular to read. (You'd essentially be performing the—regular—sound changes in your head when reading, though more likely you'd simply cache the fact that, say, aa ai au all represent /a:/, rather than explicitly assimilating the diphthongs; similarly with consonant clusters.)
But it's new and interesting to me that they have actually become phonemicized in Greenlandic.
So says Holst, at any rate! And since his description of Greenlandic was the first one I read, I tended to believe him :) Wikipedia doesn't seem convinced.