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262 Some Cheyenne Consonant Alternations: Synchronic and Diachronic Views Wayne Leman Summer Institute of Linguistics

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262 Some Cheyenne Consonant Alternations: Synchronic and Diachronic Views Wayne Leman Summer Institute of Linguistics 262 Some Cheyenne Consonant Alternations: Synchronic and Diachronic Views Wayne Leman Summer Institute of Linguistics 1. Introduction Several interesting consonant alternations occur in Cheyenne. Some find their sources of alternation in Proto- Algonquian. Others are apparently unique to Cheyenne. A preliminary inventory of Cheyenne phonemes is: p, t, (c), k, ?, s, s, (x), h, v, m, n, a, e, o. Disputed elements are parenthesized. This list is essentially that of Davis (1962)1 minus his voiceless m and n. Vowels are either phonemically high- or low-pitched. Pitch sandhi rules adjust phonemic pitches yielding five phonetic pitches (Leman, in press): raised high=*, high=', mid=~, lowered high=v, and low=v or unmarked. Vowels devoice (') predictably (Leman and Rhodes 1978). 2 . Status of c Frantz (1972) removed c (orthographic tjs) from the list of Cheyenne phonemes. It is an allophone of (1) /t/ by dissibilation of /t/ to c (orthographic ts_) , then assimilation of this affricate to a following s_ or k, or of (2) /k/ by palatalization and affrication of /k/ to c, apparently as a relic of Cheyenne male speech. Note these processes below (disregard, for now, other details of the "derivations", such as pitch sandhi processes): (1) /etehke?6/ > etsehke?o > etseske?o > etseske?o [fc-ki?6] 'It is little.' /ete?kehahe/ > etse?kehahe > etse?kehahe [fci?kfhah] 'He is young.' (2) /hohkeha?e/ > hohkeha?e [h6hkhya?i] ~ h6htseha?e [hohchya?i] 'hat' 3. Allophones of /h/ The phoneme /h/ can be shown to have the preconsonantal allophones [h], [s], [s], and [x]. Note the allophonic alternations, below, with the past-tense morpheme /-h-/ which occurs immediately following the third person prefix /e-/: (3) emane 'He drank. He is drinking.' ehmane 'He drank.' esto?e 'He got up (from bed).' essevano 'He skated.' eskoka?a?xe 'He jumped.' esseese 'He was prostrate.' exho?soo?e 'He danced.' exxaa?e 'He urinated.' 263 The basic process here is one in which /h/ assimilates (or dissimilates) to a following consonant. The advantages of treating these alternations as allophanic were recognized by oavis (1962), basically working within a structuralist framework, and by Frantz (1972), working within the frame­ work of generative phonology. Some versions of structuralist (classical) phonology would, of course, require calling the alternations in (3) "morphophonemic" since h, s, s, and x can be shown to contrast in some intervocalic-environments. 2 In this paper, however, I shall regard alternations that can be accounted for purely on phonetic grounds, such as those of (3), as being "allophanic", even if the segments involved are in clear phonemic contrast in some other environments. I shall reserve the term "morphophonemic" for alternations for which we require at least some reference to morphological (grammatical) information. 4. Status of x Davis and Frantz observed certain restrictions on the occurrence of s and x. Davis (1962:37) correctly stated that "s never occurs-preceding a vowel other than e." Frantz (1972:13) formulated a rule stating that s is backed to ~preceding ~ and ~, equivalent to rule (7) below. 4.1 It can be seen from examples such as (4)-(6) that s and ~ regularly alternate. (4) ne~e 'two (of)' ne~a ' two (times) ' eneseo?o 'They (animate) are two in number.' ene~6ho 'They (obviative) are two in number.' 'They (inanimate) are two in number.' (Sl se?se 'duck' se?~o 'duck(s) (obv.)' ( 6) e6neseotse 'He is in pain. ' e6ne:§:e6hta6htse 'His leg hurts. ' ('leg' (medial)= / -6hta/) e6nexase6htse 'He has a bellyache.' ('belly' (med.) =/-ase/) e6nex6hta6h tse 'He has a stomach ache.' ('stomach' (med.) =/-ohta/) S occurs only before e, while x occurs only before ~ or ~, that is, only before a [+back]-vowel. We, therefore, can formulate rule (7): (7) ~-Backing (regressive) 3 V s + X I (?) [+back] 264 4.2 Other forms (8)-(11) show that there is also a progressive s-Backing rule (12): (8) eoveSe 'He lay down, went to bed. ' eheamaxe •He lay on his side.' ehaoenaxe 'He prayed lying down.' (9) nemaese 'You barked at me.'1* nemeoxe 'You fought me.' (10) nee?ese 'You sliced me.' nea?taxe 'You accidentally cut me.' (11) nee?se 'You are afraid of me.' neho?xe 'You have me.' Following a [+back] vowel, s is backed to x: (12) s-Backing (progressive) v * / r (?) [+back' 4.3 Now, notice how similar rules (7) and (12) are. They are the same, except for the difference as to whether the conditioning vowel precedes or follows the segment to be conditioned. Because of this, it would be advantageous if we could collapse the regressive (7) and progressive (12) assimilation rules into one single assimilation rule (13): (13) s-Backing (?) x / V [+back] Rule (13) simply says that /s/ will be backed to x if it is preceded or foil owed (or both preceded and followed) by a [ -tback ] vowel . Neighborhood rules have a particularl y dubious status in phonological theory. There have been ma ny putative neigh- borhood rules which, upon closer examina tion, are found to be treated better as separate rules. Th ere is at least one complication of Cheye nne data that could cast doubt on the wisdom of collapsing (7) and (12) to the neighborhood rule (13). Progressive s Backing is blocked at a preverb boundary. Regressive s-Backing applies anywhere in a form. Note that the a of /ni.-/ 'first perso n prefix', the second a of /-saa-/ negative preverb', and the o of /mo-/ 'dubitative prefix' d o not cause backing of a following (14) naseese /s/, as seen in (14) 'I am prostrate.' nasaasdenohe 'I did not rob him. moseseotsehehe 'He must be free.' 265 The /s/'s in question occur immediately following a preverb boundary. It remains to be seen whether this exception to progressive assimilation is serious enough to keep us from capturing the facts of s-Backing in a single neighborhood assimilation rule. 4.4 There are a few lexical items which are potentially troublesome for our statement of progressive s-Backing. They can, however, be shown not to be exceptions to rule (12), after all. The verb for 'it is brown' is emoseskano. Superficially, it would appear that we have a case of a [+back] vowel, o, followed by s which should have backed to x according to- (12). But we must note that speakers alternate the pronunciation emoseskano with emoseskano. We know from other data that one phonemic ("phonemic" in the sense used in this paper) source of s is /s/. For instance, note (15) and (16) : (15) nemane?sese 'You (sg.) made me drink.' (16) nemane?seseme 'You (pi.) made me drink.' The first s of (16) is derived from /s/, as seen by comparison with (15), by assimilation to the following /s/. We now can conclude that the phonemic spelling of 'it is brown' is /emosehkano/. The pronunciation emoseskano is slightly closer to the phonemic spelling than is the alternate pronunciation emoseskano. The same two lines of argumentation allow us to conclude that the phonemic spelling for 'that's all, that's the end of the story' enehe?estosese ~ enehe?estosese is /enehe?ehtosese/. An AI final meaning 'to drink' is phonetically [asi?si]. It is spelled orthographically as -ase?se in Leman (1979: 157). There is, however, the possibility of spelling the final phonemically as /-ahse?se/ (Rhodes, personal communi­ cation) . (The /h/ preceding /s/ would prevent progressive s-Backing from occurring.) Whether by accident or design, that was the approach taken to spell one of the forms having this final, in the English-Cheyenne Student Dictionary (1976:135) . 'He's drunk' is spelled there as e-nono?tova-hse?se5. (However, the word for 'soda pop (cold drink)' in this dictionary (1976:104) was not written with an hs cluster in the AI final 'to drink', but, instead, with a single segment £6 . ) An hs cluster in this AI final would at first look unusual7, but its presence in phonemic spellings is not unprecedented. There is already a precedent for /h/ preceding /s/ in words containing a morpheme-final /h/ preceding root-initial /s/, e.g. (17) /e-h-seese/ esseese 'He (past tense) was prostrate.' (18) /mah-seseotet/ masseseotsestse 'when he is free' 266 4.5 When all the facts are considered, I am led to say that x is not a phoneme of Cheyenne. It is, instead, an allophone of /s/, or of /h/ by dissibilation in an /hh/ or /hx/ cluster, or of /h/ by assimilation in an /hs/ or /hs/ cluster. This reduces the phonemic inventory of Cheyenne to 13 segments: p, t, k, 7_, s_, s, h, v, m, n, a, e, o, plus a phoneme of pitch.T 5. Phonemic assignments Building upon the discussion above, and upon data and rules in Leman (1979), we can now observe some of the intricacies of Cheyenne phonemic assignment (19) . (19) Cheyenne phonemic assignments /W > [h].[si , s], [x] (See §3, above.) /s/ > [s],[s i (See §4.4, above. /£/ > [S],rx i A/ > [t], [te], [ts] (See §4, above.) A/ > [k]. [ts] (See §2, above.) (See §2, above.) It is important to notice that a Cheyenne phone can have more than one phonemic source: (20) Multiple phonemic sources [s] < /s/, /h/, /s/ [x] < /h/, /s/ [s] < /s/, /h/ [ts] < /t/, /k/ One must be careful, when phonemicizing, that phones are assigned to the proper phonemes. Study of the lexicon and of alternations within paradigms enables one to make these assignments without too much difficulty. 6. Diachronic support Finding x to be an allophone of s has strong diachronic support. Note the PA *s sources foF both s and x in the Cheyenne forms below.
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