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Observations Regarding Fox (Mesquakie) Phonology

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Observations Regarding Fox (Mesquakie) Phonology Observations Regarding Fox (Mesquakie) Phonology IVES GODDARD Smithsonian Institution In May and June of 1990 I spent a month doing linguistic fieldwork on the Fox language at the Mesquakie settlement in Tama, Iowa.1 In the course of this work a number of aspects of the phonology of Fox, which I previously knew almost entirely from published accounts, came into clearer focus. This paper is presented in the belief that even these preliminary observations would be of interest to Algonquianists, given the importance of Fox for comparative Algonquian studies. It should be emphasized, however, that this work is still in progress, and that these remarks must be considered somewhat tentative. In particular only a very little of the variation in the speech community could be sampled. A. Phonemes The phoneme inventory of Fox rates as one of the skimpiest in the world and may convey the impression that Fox phonology is simple: Consonants Vowels p t c k i o s s h i- o- m n e a w y e- a- The rest of this paper will show that this impression of simplicity is false. All words, except for some asyntactic particles (1), end in short vowels (which are ordinarily devoiced), and short e does not occur word-initially *I am indebted to a number of members of the Mesquakie community for aiding my work. The forms in this paper were obtained from Adeline Wanatee and Leonard Young Bear; some of these were re-elicited from texts or other materials. Fox forms (or variants) known only from other sources are always identified as such; my initials (IG) have been added to indicate that I also heard a variant cited from another source. 157 158 IVES GODDARD (being replaced morphophonemically by i). Consonant sequences are highly restricted (§G), but consonant-semivowel sequences are abundant (§H). Vowel sequences are absent from ordinary words in explicit pronunciation. Vowel sequences do, however, occur under very specific conditions in the exclama- tive and interrogative intonations (§E) and are a characteristic of the casual style (§D); see also the examples in §B. B. Extrasystemic Features In addition to the phonemes that occur generally in Fox words, there are some extrasystemic phones and distributional features restricted to interjec­ tions, baby-talk words, and loan words. Interjections and baby-talk words may have nasalized vowels (e, Q) or glottal stop (P), word-initial e, final long vowels, and vowel sequences: (1) ehehe 'yes' (confirming) ([eh£he ~ [eh£h ~ [eh£]);2 ghg- 'So-o-o!'; waP?, wa? 'What?'; haoP 'yes, alright' (agreeing), 'hi' (= [haw] ~ [haw?] ~ [hao?] ~ [hao-?]); pa? 'icky, dirty' (baby talk); ii' 'Say!' ([si]); o- 'Oh!' ([6]); ya- 'My!' (used by women) ([ya-]) Loanwords attest r, /, /, v, and foreign consonant clusters and vowel se­ quences: (2) tre'kite'hi 'tractor'; fotipa-ni 'football'; neteskiletemi 'my skillet'; nehccrhemi 'my chair'; nehpaipema 'my (tobacco) pipe' Loanwords of this type are considered stylistically inferior by at least some speakers. One speaker jocularly condemned them as [vorhisatoween]3 'Voorhis language' because of the prominent citation of the word ire kite hi 'tractor' in Voorhis (1971:63). C. Syllabary The traditional syllabary (Jones 1906) is still in use. The syllabic charac­ ters clearly comprise alphabetic components (one vowel and from zero to three consonants), but they are always written as units. They are probably derived, perhaps via Potawatomis or Ojibwas, from primers prepared by Roman Catholic missionaries in the 19th century. The syllabary leaves out all of the phonetic features of the language that would ever give anyone any trouble, which includes a large part of the things discussed in this paper. In particular it does not write h or vowel length (Goddard 1988:194-195), omissions which result in very extensive ambiguity: 2I did not hear this word as ehe- (Voorhis 1971:63) but with an initial short, close e [e] rather than a long, open e- [c]. 3Casual style; see §D. FOX PHONOLOGY 159 (3) Written (apwakana) = apwakana 'frying pan', ahpwakana '(tobacco) pipe' (4) Written (kisakatewi) = kisahkatewi 'it's already set in the ground', kisahkatewi 'it's already dried', kis-ahkatewi (= kisi-ahkatewi) 'it's already burned' Although adept readers can often see immediately what the various possible readings of a written word are, deciding which one is best in a given context may take considerable reflection. Even when readers understand a sentence in its intended meaning, they may give a single word in the sentence a pronunciation appropriate to a distinct homograph. D. Deliberate and Casual Styles The type of Fox that is familiar from the publications of William Jones and Truman Michelson, the sources for all the Fox data used by Leonard Bloomfield, differs noticeably from the type of Fox ordinarily used today. Paul Voorhis (1971:74-75; cf. Goddard 1988) referred to the older type as the deliberate style and the younger type as the casual style. The most prominent innovations in the casual style are the loss of most intervocalic semivowels, with shortening of resulting prevocalic long vowels,4 and the loss of short vowels after nasals before a homorganic stop or a pause: (5) Deliberate: apeno-ya-wi 'it's sheltered (from wind)' Casual: [a-penoai] Deliberate: a-penoya-niwi 'it's sheltered (where they are)' Casual: [a-penoa-nii] (6) Deliberate: akwi kehke-netamanini 'I don't know' Casual: [a-kwakghke-ndAma-nm] (normal) [ahke-ndAmanfn] (extreme) I located only one speaker who could consistently provide pronunciations in the deliberate style, though other speakers control sporadic features of it (and there were many I did not interview). Because the traditional writ­ ing system is based on the deliberate style it is extremely difficult for most speakers to use consistently and accurately. I did not make a study specif­ ically of the language of speakers who control only the casual style, but expressions obtained or overheard from such speakers, while phonetically advanced, were not observed to differ from the older form of the language in their grammar. Note, for example, the pragmatically triggered inanimate obviative in (5), which was used spontaneously by such a speaker. 4 Long vowels were sometimes heard retained before other vowels; further in­ vestigation of the conditions under which this does or does not happen is needed. 160 IVES GODDARD E. Prosodtc Features Fox has a number of patterns of stress and intonation (cf. Voorhis 1971:70- 73). The most frequently heard are the normal, interrogative, and exclama- tive.5 In normal intonation (the affirmative of Voorhis) the primary stress and highest pitch fall on the second or the fourth syllable from the end of the word, the penult or the pre-antepenult. Pre-antepenultimate stress cannot be common in the world's languages, but as the final vowel in such words is devoiced perhaps the stress could be described as falling on the first or third from the end, counting only the stressable syllables. This devoicing is not found, however, in the word-final vowel sequences of the casual-style (5). Isolated words, as in one-word utterances or in lists, have the stress on the penult, as do words that have only two or three syllables: (7) neiakwenemg. 'I was unwilling.' Otherwise, ordinary words in ordinary sentences typically have the stress on the pre-antepenult: (8) . wa~ waneska hakt wrh'ka'ki'wrte-madj. '. that you would go around with bad ones.' One sometimes hears unexpected primary or secondary penultimate stress: (9) ... nemedimenemg, ...'... I hesitated, . .' The normal intonation is used for non-emphatic statements and commands and for question-word questions. In the interrogative intonation the utterance is spoken with a raised pitch (indicated here by an upward-pointing arrow) and the stress falls on the third syllable from the end, the antepenult. It is used for yes-no questions: (10) ]nih'maw-dnenwi? 'May I go swimming?' (cf. nih-maw-anenwi 'I'm going swimming') The long penult of a two-syllable phonological word breaks into two distinct short-vowel syllables, with the stress on the first: (11) Inohka kiih-pya? 'Will you come again?' (cf. nahka kih'pya. 'Come again.'; 21) In this paper primary stress (marked with acute accent) and secondary stress (grave accent), word-final vowel devoicing (circle beneath letter), and intonational contours (raised pitch: T ; falling pitch: "; rising pitch: " ) are indicated on words tor wh.ch these features were specifically recorded. The question of how to indicate these features in a maximally parsimonious phonemic notation is here left open. FOX PHONOLOGY 161 In longer sentences the sentence-final interrogative intonation may appear more than once, presenting challenges to the description of the relation between the prosodic and syntactic structures: (12) ^ahte'toke na'tdwino'ni menok$, a'mi-kaski-oni'ca'nesiki? 'Might there be a medicine one can drink to be able to have children?' The sentence in (12) is from Michelson (1925:336.1-2), as read from my syllabic transcription; it has been confirmed against the original syllabic manuscript. Syntactically it comprises a main clause (ahtetoke natdwinoni 'there.might.be a.medicine') and a relative clause (Goddard 1987b:113—114) in which the object of an included lower verb is the head (normal intonation: menoke, a'mi-kaski-onicdnesikj 'if.one.drinks.(it), which. .one.would.be. able.to.have.children'). The exclamative intonation has stressing, lengthening, and distortion of the final vowel, and a more or less distinct secondary stress on the pre- antepenult. Final -i and -e are replaced by -er, and final -o and -a are replaced by -oV (with the loss of a preceding postconsonantal w). In these diphthongal sequences the pitch falls and trails off on the second element: (13) newani-hkei-! 'I forgot!' (cf.
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