Ich kann ihnen sagen... /nuschel

[pne]

John Wells reports “some assorted nuggets of interest” from the ICPHs XVII (the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences) in Hong Kong.

One 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).

Comments

Re: vowel phonemes in West Greenlandic

[pne]

and in older Latin-alphabet spellings of Canadian Inuktitut varieties

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extent Labrador and other Canadian varieties, and his orthography was fairly influential in Canada even if it's been superseded by other orthographies in QC and NU.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.