DOCSLIB.ORG

Vowel Harmony in Two Even Dialects: Production and Perception

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Vowel Harmony in Two Even Dialects: Production and Perception Vowel harmony in two Even dialects: Production and perception Published by LOT phone: +31 30 253 6111 Trans 10 3512 JK Utrecht e-mail: [email protected] The Netherlands http://www.lotschool.nl Cover illustration: Even reindeer herder Anatoly Afanasyevich Solodikov, Central Kamchatka. Photo by Brigitte Pakendorf. ISBN: 978-94-6093-180-2 NUR 616 Copyright © 2015: Natalia Aralova. All rights reserved. Vowel harmony in two Even dialects: Production and perception ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. D.C. van den Boom ten overstaan van een door het College voor Promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Aula der Universiteit op vrijdag 4 september 2015, te 11.00 uur door Natalia Aralova geboren te Mytischi, Rusland Promotiecommissie Promotores: Prof. Dr. B. Pakendorf Université Lumière (Lyon II) Prof. Dr. P.P.G. Boersma Universiteit van Amsterdam Copromotores: Dr. S.R. Hamann Universiteit van Amsterdam Dr. S. Grawunder Max Planck Institute Overige leden: Prof. Dr. P.C. Hengeveld Universiteit van Amsterdam Prof. Dr. A.P. Versloot Universiteit van Amsterdam Dr. C. Odé Universiteit van Amsterdam Prof. Dr. A.V. Dybo Russian State University for the Humanities Dr. Y. Chen Universiteit Leiden Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen Contents Acknowledgements v Funding vi Author contributions vi Abbreviations and symbols vii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Geographical location and genealogical affiliation 2 1.2 Dialects 5 1.3 Contact and sociolinguistic situation 8 1.4 Previous studies on Even 10 1.5 Types of data used for the analysis 11 1.6 Structure of the dissertation 12 2 Introduction to Even phonology with a focus on vowels 15 2.1 Consonants 15 2.1.1 Phonetic description and allophonic variation 16 2.1.1.1 Stops 16 2.1.1.2 Fricative 18 2.1.1.3 Affricates 18 2.1.1.4 Nasals 19 2.1.1.5 Lateral glide 19 2.1.1.6 Trill 20 2.1.1.7 Semivowels 20 2.1.2 Minimal pairs for consonants 21 2.1.3 Regular phonological processes for consonants: ii Contents Assimilation 23 2.2 Vowels 27 2.2.1 Correspondence of orthographies and transcriptions 28 2.2.2 Phonetic description and allophonic variation of vowels 29 2.2.3 Minimal and quasi-minimal pairs 33 2.3 Phonotactics 35 2.3.1 Syllable structure 35 2.3.2 Vowel harmony 38 2.4 Description of the vowel opposition by different scholars 39 2.5 Research question 44 3 Acoustic characteristics of Even vowels and the question of RTR/ATR 47 3.1. Pharyngealization and RTR/ATR 47 3.1.1 The RTR/ATR distinction: a brief history 48 3.1.2 Description of the RTR/ATR distinction 49 3.1.3 Acoustic correlates of the RTR/ATR distinction 54 3.1.4 Acoustic and articulatory data in Tungusic languages 57 3.2 Even data on vowel quality: analysis of vowel production 60 3.2.1 Methods 61 3.2.1.1 Speakers and recording settings 61 3.2.1.2 Data 62 3.2.1.3 Acoustic analysis 65 3.2.1.4 Statistical analysis 67 3.2.2 Results 68 3.2.2.1 F1 68 3.2.2.2 F2 71 3.2.2.3 F3 73 3.2.2.4 Spectral slope 76 3.2.2.5 Duration 78 3.2.3 Summary 87 3.3 Discussion 89 Contents iii 4 Perception study of harmonic vowel sets 95 4.1 Experiments in perception 95 4.2 Experimental data from Even speakers 98 4.2.1 Research questions and experiments 98 4.2.2 Stimuli 99 4.2.3 Participants and settings 107 4.2.4 Results 108 4.2.4.1 Experiment 1 108 4.2.4.2 Experiment 2 119 4.2.4.3 Experiment 3 125 4.3 Discussion 130 5 The role of consonants in the system of vowel harmony 135 5.1 Cross-linguistic evidence and the data from Even dialects 135 5.2 Acoustic variation of /r/ in Even 138 5.2.1 Methods 138 5.2.2 Types of /r/ in Even 142 5.2.3 Results 146 5.3 Acoustic variation of /l/ in Even 157 5.3.1 Methods 157 5.3.2 Results 160 5.4 Allophonic variation between velar and uvular voiceless stops 167 5.5 Discussion 178 6 Discussion and conclusions 181 6.1 The question of the feature underlying vowel harmony 181 6.2 Disagreement between the results of the acoustic and the perception study 184 6.3 Near-mergers in Labov’s paradigm 187 iv Contents 6.4 Near-mergers as an explanation for the Even data 189 6.5 Consonantal cues in the dialect of the Bystraia district: possible change of the whole phonological system 201 6.6 Conclusions 204 Appendix 1 207 Appendix 2 209 Appendix 3 211 Appendix 4 212 Appendix 5 213 Appendix 6 214 Appendix 7 215 References 217 Summary 227 Samenvatting 229 Curriculum Vitae 231 v Acknowledgements I am obliged and grateful to so many people who helped me and supported me while I was working on my dissertation that it is just impossible to mention everyone here. But I would like to express my gratitude to the most important persons. First of all these are my supervisors Brigitte Pakendorf, Sven Grawunder, Silke Hamann and Paul Boersma. I am extremely grateful to Brigitte Pakendorf for introducing me to the Even people and for our joint fieldwork trips to the Bystraia district and Sebian-Küöl, for her generous scientific advice and psychological support throughout my PhD, for the innumerable skype sessions we had over the last years and for correcting my English, for her patience and for believing in me. I want to thank Sven Grawunder for allowing me to be a part of the phonetics team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, for his great practical help in my work, for the opportunity to pop by his office with burning questions almost any time, as well as for the collaborative work we carried out together. Many thanks go Silke Hamann and Paul Boersma for accepting me as an external PhD student at the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, for valuable discussion of my work on the different stages and for remote supervision. Silke Hamann was always ready to answer questions, and I am obliged to her for suggesting numerous changes and corrections, both substantial and minor. I am grateful to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology for hosting me, first within the Max Planck Research Group on Comparative Population Linguistics and later at the Department of Linguistics. To the Director of this department, Bernard Comrie, I am deeply indebted for his personal interest in my project. Crucially, this work would not be possible without the enthusiastic help of some Even people I met doing fieldwork. The people with whom I worked most are Rimma Maksimovna Egorova, the late Efim Innokentyevich Amganov, Valentina Innokentyevna Akhmetova, Vladimir Afanasyevich Cherkanov from the Bystraia district; Nadezhda Petrovna Zakharova, Tatyana Petrovna Krivoshapkina, Klim Klimovich Krivoshapkin, Mikhail Vasilyevich Krivoshapkin, Iya Vasilyevna Krivoshapkina from Sebian-Küöl; Ekaterina Afanasyevna Krivoshapkina from Yakutsk. Although data recorded in Topolinoe are not analyzed in this thesis I would nevertheless like to acknowledge the help of the following speakers: Tatyana Vasilyevna Zakharova, Nataliya Mikhaylovna Golikova and Avdokiya Mikhaylovna Lebedeva. During my stay in Leipzig I was lucky to meet many people discussions with whom influenced my work a lot. I am grateful to Bodo Winter, Leonardo Lancia and Natalie Fecher for conversations directly and indirectly connected to my dissertation. I am obliged to Michael Dannemann and Roger Mundry for numerous discussions of statistical analyses of my data. I would like to thank Sandro Vasiljevich Kodzasov, who unfortunately passed away in October 2014, and John Esling for listening to some of the vi Acknowledgements Even data I recorded and sharing their impressions. I am also grateful to the assistants in our DOBES project, Evgeniya Zhivotova and Luise Zippel, for fruitful discussions and practical help. A special thanks goes to Dejan Matić for supporting me at the initial stages of my work in Leipzig, for his course on Even grammar at the University of Leipzig, for introducing me to the Evens in Topolinoe and for sharing with me his observations on Even phonetics. I also thank Eugénie Stapert for numerous discussions of the fieldwork issues and for translating the summary of the dissertation into Dutch. Useful input came from the audience of the Manchester Phonology Meetings in 2012 and 2014, in particular Patrick Honeybone, as well as from members and the guests of the Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who have attended my work-in-progress presentations over the years. I would like to mention here also several colleagues of mine, initially from Moscow, however, currently living in various different places in the world. Elena Kalinina, Fedor Rozhanskiy and Valentin Gusev encouraged me to start working on Even phonetics and supported me throughout this work; Alexander Arkhipov and Maria Brykina provided wholesome discussions, especially concerning the organization of the work. Special thanks go to my family and my husband for their support. It was really important have people near me who would always find the right words to console me and to cheer me up in psychologically difficult moments. Last but not least, I would like to express my deep gratitude to my alma mater — Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the Lomonosov Moscow State University — and to the person who developed my interest in linguistics, especially field linguistics, — Alexander Evgenyevich Kibrik.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Even Language: Studying, Teaching and Linguistic Ecology Challenges
    Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences 2021 14(6): 822–833 DOI: 10.17516/1997–1370–0763 УДК 811.51 The Even Language: Studying, Teaching and Linguistic Ecology Challenges Alexander A. Petrova, с and Veronica A. Razumovskayab aHerzen State Pedagogical University of Russia St. Petersburg, Russian Federation bSiberian Federal University Krasnoyarsk, Russian Federation сM.K. Ammosov North- Eastern Federal University Yakutsk, Russian Federation Received 05.03.2021, received in revised form 21.04.2021, accepted 21.05.2021 Abstract. The article is devoted to the history of the study and teaching of the Even (Lamut) language in Russia in the period from the 17th – to the beginning of the 21st century. Special attention is paid to the problem of linguistic ecology. The fundamental and applied researches in the synchronic and diachronic aspects, as well as issues of teaching the Even language in families, pre-school educational institutions, colleges and higher educational institutions of Russia are studied. Ethnolinguistics is considered as a possible tool of language preservation and development, i. e., the Even language teaching in the close connection with traditional and modern material and spiritual culture. In this way, the role of vocabulary reflecting the song and dance creative activity, decorative and applied art, ceremonies (of life cycle: birth, wedding, funeral) and economy (hunting, fishing, reindeer breeding), taboo and euphemisms, folk knowledge (metrology, meteorology, space orientation, medicine, calendar, food and cuisine, etc.), as well as the words of religious beliefs (animism, shamanism, Christianity) in the formation of a language picture of the world and the Evens’ mentality is being determined.
    [Show full text]
  • Tungusic from the Perspective of Areal Linguistics : Focusing on the Bikin Dialect of Udihe
    Title Tungusic from the Perspective of Areal Linguistics : Focusing on the Bikin Dialect of Udihe Author(s) 白, 尚燁 Citation 北海道大学. 博士(文学) 甲第12069号 Issue Date 2016-03-24 DOI 10.14943/doctoral.k12069 Doc URL http://hdl.handle.net/2115/61556 Type theses (doctoral) File Information Baek_Sangyub.pdf Instructions for use Hokkaido University Collection of Scholarly and Academic Papers : HUSCAP Tungusic from the Perspective of Areal Linguistics: Focusing on the Bikin Dialect of Udihe （地域言語学的観点から見たツングース諸語―ウデヘ語のビキン方言を中心に） By Sangyub BAEK A Thesis Submitted to Graduate School of Letters, Hokkaido University In Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor in the field of History and Area Studies Table of Contents List of Figures .................................................................................................................................... i List of Tables ................................................................................................................................... iii List of Maps ..................................................................................................................................... vi Preface ........................................................................................................................................... viii Acknowledgement ............................................................................................................................ ix List of Abbreviations .......................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Turkish Vowel Harmony: Underspecification, Iteration, Multiple Rules
    Turkish vowel harmony: Underspecification, iteration, multiple rules LING 451/551 Spring 2011 Prof. Hargus Data • Turkish data on handout. [a] represents a low back unrounded vowel (more standardly [ɑ]). Morphological analysis and morpheme alternants • Words in Turkish – root alone – root followed by one or two suffixes • Suffixes – plural suffix, -[ler] ~ -[lar] – genitive suffix, -[in] ~ -[un] ~ -[ün] ~ -[ɨn] • Order of morphemes – root - plural - genitive Possible vowel features i ɨ u ü e a o ö high + + + + - - - - low - - - - - + - - back - + + - - + + - front + - - + + - - + round - - + + - - + + Distinctive features of vowels i ɨ u ü e a o ö high + + + + - - - - back - + + - - + + - round - - + + - - + + ([front] could be used instead of [back].) Values of [low] are redundant: V -high [+low] +back -round Otherwise: V [-low] Distribution of suffix alternants • Plural suffix – -[ler] / front vowels C(C) ___ – -[lar] / back vowels C(C) ___ • Genitive suffix – -[in] / front non-round vowels C(C) ___ – -[ün] / front round vowels C(C) ___ – -[ɨn] / back non-round vowels C(C) ___ – -[un] / back round vowels C(C) ___ Subscript and superscript convention • C1 = one or more consonants: C, CC, CCC, etc. • C0 = zero or more consonants: 0, C, CC, CCC, etc. • C1 = at most one consonant: 0, C 2 • C1 = minimum one, maximum 2 C: C(C) Analysis of alternating morphemes • Symmetrical distribution of suffix alternants • No non-alternating suffixes No single suffix alternant can be elevated to UR URs • UR = what all suffixes have in common • genitive: -/ V n/ [+high] (values of [back] and [round] will be added to match preceding vowel) an underspecified vowel, or ―archiphoneme‖ (Odden p. 239) Backness Harmony • Both high and non-high suffixes assimilate in backness to a preceding vowel • Backness Harmony: V --> [+ back] / V C0 ____ [+back] V --> [-back] / V C0 ____ [-back] (―collapsed‖) V --> [ back] / V C0 ____ [ back] (This is essentially the same as Hayes‘ [featurei]..
    [Show full text]
  • Phonemic Vs. Derived Glides
    See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/240419751 Phonemic vs. derived glides ARTICLE in LINGUA · DECEMBER 2008 Impact Factor: 0.71 · DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2007.10.003 CITATIONS READS 14 32 1 AUTHOR: Susannah V Levi New York University 24 PUBLICATIONS 172 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Available from: Susannah V Levi Retrieved on: 09 October 2015 Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Lingua 118 (2008) 1956–1978 www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua Phonemic vs. derived glides Susannah V. Levi * Department of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology, New York University, 665 Broadway, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10003, United States Received 2 February 2007; received in revised form 30 June 2007; accepted 2 October 2007 Available online 27 September 2008 Abstract Previous accounts of glides have argued that all glides are derived from vowels. In this paper, we examine data from Karuk, Sundanese, and Pulaar which reveal the existence of two types of phonologically distinct glides both cross-linguistically and within a single language. ‘‘Phonemic’’ glides are distinct from underlying vowels and pattern with other sonorant consonants, while ‘‘derived’’ glides are non-syllabic, positional variants of underlying vowels and exhibit vowel-like behavior. It is argued that the phonological difference between these two types of glides lies in their different underlying featural representations. Derived glides are positional variants of vowels and therefore featurally identical. In contrast, phonemic glides are featurally distinct from underlying vowels and therefore pattern differently. Though a phono- logical distinction between these two types of glides is evident in these three languages, a reliable phonetic distinction does not appear to exist.
    [Show full text]
  • Vowel Sounds Can Symbolise the Felt Heaviness of Obje
    CORRESPONDENCES AND SYMBOLISM Cross-Sensory Correspondences in Language: Vowel Sounds can Symbolise the Felt Heaviness of Objects Peter Walker1,2 & Caroline Regina Parameswaran2 1 Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, UK 2 Department of Psychology, Sunway University, Malaysia Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Peter Walker, Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YF, UK e-mail: [email protected] tel: +44 (0) 1524 593163 fax: +44 (0) 1524 593744 1 CORRESPONDENCES AND SYMBOLISM Abstract In sound symbolism, a word's sound induces expectations about the nature of a salient aspect of the word's referent. Walker (2016a) proposed that cross-sensory correspondences can be the source of these expectations and the present study assessed three implications flowing from this proposal. First, sound symbolism will embrace a wide range of referent features, including heaviness. Second, any feature of a word's sound able to symbolise one aspect of the word's referent will also be able to symbolise corresponding aspects of the referent (e.g., a sound feature symbolising visual pointiness will also symbolise lightness in weight). Third, sound symbolism will be independent of the sensory modality through which a word's referent is encoded (e.g., whether heaviness is felt or seen). Adults judged which of two contrasting novel words was most appropriate as a name for the heavier or lighter of two otherwise identical hidden novel objects they were holding in their hands. The alternative words contrasted in their vowels and/or consonants, one or both of which were known to symbolise visual pointiness. Though the plosive or continuant nature of the consonants did not influence the judged appropriateness of a word to symbolise the heaviness of its referent, back/open vowels, compared to front/close vowels, were judged to symbolise felt heaviness.
    [Show full text]
  • Two Statistical Approaches to Finding Vowel Harmony
    Two Statistical Approaches to Finding Vowel Harmony Adam C. Baker University of Chicago [email protected] July 27, 2009 Abstract The present study examines two methods for learning and modeling vowel harmony from text corpora. The first uses Expectation Maximization with Hidden Markov Mod- els to find the most probable HMM for a training corpus. The second uses pointwise Mutual Information between distant vowels in a Boltzmann distribution, along with the Minimal Description Length principle to find and model vowel harmony. Both methods correctly detect vowel harmony in Finnish and Turkish, and correctly recognize that English and Italian have no vowel harmony. HMMs easily model the transparent neu- tral vowels in Finnish vowel harmony, but have difficulty modeling secondary rounding harmony in Turkish. The Boltzmann model correctly captures secondary roundness harmony and the opacity of low vowels in roundness harmony in Turkish, but has more trouble capturing the transparency of neutral vowels in Finnish. 1 Introduction: Vowel Harmony and Unsupervised Learning The problem of child language acquisition has been a driving concern of modern theoret- ical linguistics since at least the 1950s. But traditional linguistic research has focused on constructing models like the Optimality Theory model of phonology (Prince and Smolensky, 2004). Learning models for those theories like the OT learning theory in Riggle (2004) are 1 sought later to explain how a child could learn a grammar. A lot of recent research in computational linguistics has turned this trend around. Break- throughs in artificial intelligence and speech processing in the '80s has lead many phonologists starting from models with well-known learning algorithms and using those models to extract phonological analyses from naturally occurring speech (for an overview and implications, see Seidenberg, 1997).
    [Show full text]
  • SSC: the Science of Talking
    SSC: The Science of Talking (for year 1 students of medicine) Week 3: Sounds of the World’s Languages (vowels and consonants) Michael Ashby, Senior Lecturer in Phonetics, UCL PLIN1101 Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology A Lecture 4 page 1 Vowel Description Essential reading: Ashby & Maidment, Chapter 5 4.1 Aim: To introduce the basics of vowel description and the main characteristics of the vowels of RP English. 4.2 Definition of vowel: Vowels are produced without any major obstruction of the airflow; the intra-oral pressure stays low, and vowels are therefore sonorant sounds. Vowels are normally voiced. Vowels are articulated by raising some part of the tongue body (that is the front or the back of the tongue notnot the tip or blade) towards the roof of the oral cavity (see Figure 1). 4.3 Front vowels are produced by raising the front of the tongue towards the hard palate. Back vowels are produced by raising the back of the tongue towards the soft palate. Central vowels are produced by raising the centre part of the tongue towards the junction of the hard and soft palates. 4.4 The height of a vowel refers to the degree of raising of the relevant part of the tongue. If the tongue is raised so as to be close to the roof of the oral cavity then a close or high vowel is produced. If the tongue is only slightly raised, so that there is a wide gap between its highest point and the roof of the oral cavity, then an open or lowlowlow vowel results.
    [Show full text]
  • Glossary of Key Terms
    Glossary of Key Terms accent: a pronunciation variety used by a specific group of people. allophone: different phonetic realizations of a phoneme. allophonic variation: variations in how a phoneme is pronounced which do not create a meaning difference in words. alveolar: a sound produced near or on the alveolar ridge. alveolar ridge: the small bony ridge behind the upper front teeth. approximants: obstruct the air flow so little that they could almost be classed as vowels if they were in a different context (e.g. /w/ or /j/). articulatory organs – (or articulators): are the different parts of the vocal tract that can change the shape of the air flow. articulatory settings or ‘voice quality’: refers to the characteristic or long-term positioning of articulators by individual or groups of speakers of a particular language. aspirated: phonemes involve an auditory plosion (‘puff of air’) where the air can be heard passing through the glottis after the release phase. assimilation: a process where one sound is influenced by the characteristics of an adjacent sound. back vowels: vowels where the back part of the tongue is raised (like ‘two’ and ‘tar’) bilabial: a sound that involves contact between the two lips. breathy voice: voice quality where whisper is combined with voicing. cardinal vowels: a set of phonetic vowels used as reference points which do not relate to any specific language. central vowels: vowels where the central part of the tongue is raised (like ‘fur’ and ‘sun’) centring diphthongs: glide towards /ə/. citation form: the way we say a word on its own. close vowel: where the tongue is raised as close as possible to the roof of the mouth.
    [Show full text]
  • Title the Kilen Language of Manchuria
    The Kilen language of Manchuria: grammar of amoribund Title Tungusic language Author(s) Zhang, Paiyu.; 张派予. Citation Issue Date 2013 URL http://hdl.handle.net/10722/181880 The author retains all proprietary rights, (such as patent Rights rights) and the right to use in future works. ! ! ! THE KILEN LANGUAGE OF MANCHURIA: GRAMMAR OF A MORIBUND TUNGUSIC LANGUAGE ZHANG PAIYU Ph.D. THESIS UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG February 2013 Abstract of thesis entitled The Kilen Language of Manchuria: Grammar of a moribund Tungusic language Submitted by Zhang Paiyu For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong in February 2013 This thesis is the first comprehensive reference grammar of Kilen, a lesser known and little studied language of the Tungusic Family. At present, Kilen is a moribund language with less than 10 bilingual speakers in the eastern part of Heilongjiang Province of P.R.China. Since the language does not have a writing system, the examples are provided in IPA transcription with morpheme tagging. This thesis is divided into eight chapters. Chapter 1 states the background information of Kilen language in terms of Ethnology, Migration and Language Contact. Beginning from Chapter 2, the language is described in the aspects of Phonology, Morphology and Syntax. This thesis is mainly concerned with morphosyntactic aspects of Kilen. Chapters 6-8 provide a portrait of Kilen syntactic organization. The sources for this description include the work of You Zhixian (1989), which documents oral literature originally recorded by You himself, a fluent Kilen native speaker; example sentences drawn from previous linguistic descriptions, mainly those of An (1985) and You & Fu (1987); author’s field records and personal consultation data recorded and transcribed by the author and Wu Mingxiang, one of the last fluent native speakers.
    [Show full text]
  • Reconstructing Proto-Sahaptian Sounds
    Reconstructing Proto-Sahaptian Sounds Noel Rude Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation Sahaptin and the mutually unintelligible Nez Perce comprise the Sahaptian language family. This paper attempts to reconstruct the sound system of the parent language of that family. There is little dialect variation in the available data for Nez Perce, whereas Sahaptin divides into three definable dialect clusters: Columbia River (Umatilla, Tenino, Celilo, etc.); Northwest (Klickitat, Upper Cowlitz, Yakima, etc.); Northeast (Priest Rapids, Walla Walla, Palouse, etc.). Various features distinguish the dialects, e.g., long vowels derived from certain VCV sequences are more common in the Northern dialects and in Nez Perce, the Northeast dialects and Nez Perce are more likely to preserve the glottal stop, and the palatalization of *k is most extensive in the Columbia River dialects. The reconstructions proposed here are, as always, more or less tentative. Unless otherwise indicated the examples labeled Sahaptin (S) are from Umatilla.1 Figure 1. The Sahaptian language family Proto-Sahaptian Nez Perce Sahaptin Columbia River Northern Northwest Northeast 1 For the connection between Sahaptin and Nez Perce, see Aoki (1962), Rigsby (1965), Rigsby and Silverstein (1969), and Rude (1996, 2006). For the relationship with Plateau Penutian, see Aoki (1963), Rude (1987), and Pharis (2006). For a possible relationship within the broader Penutian macro-family, see DeLancey & Golla (1979) and Mithun (1999), also Rude (2000) for a possible connection with Uto-Aztecan. For Sahaptin grammars, see Jacobs (1931), Millstein (ca. 1990a), Rigsby and Rude (1996), Rude (2009), and for published NW Sahaptin texts, see Jacobs (1929, 1934, 1937). Beavert and Hargus (2010) provide a dictionary of Yakima Sahaptin, Millstein (ca.
    [Show full text]
  • Vowel Harmony in Two Even Dialects Dialects
    400 220 Natalia Aralova Natalia Aralova Natalia Aralova Vowel harmony in two Even Vowel harmony in two Even dialects dialects Production and perception Production and perception This dissertation analyzes vowel systems in two dialects of Even, an endangered Northern Tungusic language spoken in Eastern Siberia. The data were collected during fieldwork in the Bystraia district of Central Kamchatka and in the village of Sebian-Küöl in Yakutia. The focus of the study is the Even system of vowel harmony, which in previous literature has been assumed to be robust. The central question concerns the number of vowel oppositions and the nature of the feature underlying the opposition between harmonic sets. The results of an acoustic study show a consistent pattern for only one acoustic parameter, namely F1, which can harmony in two Even dialects Vowel be phonologically interpreted as a feature [±height]. This acoustic study is supplemented by perception experiments. The results of the latter suggest that perceptually there is no harmonic opposition for high vowels, i.e., the harmonic pairs of high vowels have merged. Moreover, in the dialect of the Bystraia district certain consonants function as perceptual cues for the harmonic set of a word. In other words, the Bystraia Even harmony system, which was previously based on vowels, is being transformed into new oppositions among consonants. ISBN 978-94-6093-180-2 Vowel harmony in two Even dialects: Production and perception Published by LOT phone: +31 30 253 6111 Trans 10 3512 JK Utrecht e-mail: [email protected] The Netherlands http://www.lotschool.nl Cover illustration: Even reindeer herder Anatoly Afanasyevich Solodikov, Central Kamchatka.
    [Show full text]
  • The Ethno-Linguistic Situation in the Krasnoyarsk Territory at the Beginning of the Third Millennium
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Siberian Federal University Digital Repository Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences 7 (2011 4) 919-929 ~ ~ ~ УДК 81-114.2 The Ethno-Linguistic Situation in the Krasnoyarsk Territory at the Beginning of the Third Millennium Olga V. Felde* Siberian Federal University 79 Svobodny, Krasnoyarsk, 660041 Russia 1 Received 4.07.2011, received in revised form 11.07.2011, accepted 18.07.2011 This article presents the up-to-date view of ethno-linguistic situation in polylanguage and polycultural the Krasnoyarsk Territory. The functional typology of languages of this Siberian region has been given; historical and proper linguistic causes of disequilibrum of linguistic situation have been developed; the objects for further study of this problem have been specified. Keywords: majority language, minority languages, native languages, languages of ethnic groups, diaspora languages, communicative power of the languages. Point Krasnoyarsk Territory which area (2339,7 thousand The study of ethno-linguistic situation in square kilometres) could cover the third part of different parts of the world, including Russian Australian continent. Sociolinguistic examination Federation holds a prominent place in the range of of the Krasnoyarsk Territory is important for the problems of present sociolinguistics. This field of solution of a number of the following theoretical scientific knowledge is represented by the works and practical objectives: for revelation of the of such famous scholars as V.M. Alpatov (1999), characteristics of communicative space of the A.A. Burikin (2004), T.G. Borgoyakova (2002), country and its separate regions, for monitoring V.V.
    [Show full text]