New Blog to Check Out....

For all you language people out there…..or those interested in the thoughts and musings of a translator team…..our good friends (Ryan and Crystal) have a blog all about this.  When I read their most recent post (and realized I didn't understand a THING they were writing), I thought of my friends back home who are all into speech and language, etc, etc.  So…..Kerry and Marisa….any idea what our friends are talking about?  By the way, I just want to take this moment to thank Kerry and Marisa for teaching me the word "fricative"!  It really comes in handy over here…..

Anyway….you can check out more of their blog by following this path: www.pennedinpng.wordpress.com

The following is taken directly from their blog:

loan words as proof for epenthesis

One interesting way to learn about a language one is trying to analyze is to see how borrowed words are transformed to fit the rules of the language. For instance, 'kar', the Tok Pisin spelling of English 'car', becomes [qalɨ] in Saut Manda. The [k] sound that begins the word in English is pronounced from further back in the mouth – it's a uvular plosive instead of a velar plosive. The word ends in vowel which we call a 'barred-i'. This is a vowel that is halfway between an [i] and a [u]. Anyway, the ways that the Saut Manda people pronounce borrowed words reveals facts about their language that may otherwise be difficult to figure out. I originally learned about this barred-i epenthesis (insertion) when I collected a story where the person pronounced Crystal's name. I hadn't ever noticed it before, but sure enoughː [qlistəlɨ]. They added that barred-i in after the [l]ǃ Here is a snap shot of the sentence where Crystal's name appeared, as entered in an interlinear tool in a program called Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx)ː

When I began to look over all my data, I realized quickly that there were no voiced plosives (i.e., b, d, and ɢ) in word-final position. There weren't any l's, f's, or s's in that environment either. Instead, these words all ended in barred-i's (e.g., [dabɨ] 'fourthborn female').

As I have been analyzing the Saut Manda syllable template, I came to a group of words that I was confused about. Take the following examplesː

[ˈjɔlɨ̆fe] 'joint'
[ˈbɛdɨ̆laq̚] 'sore'
[ˈqosɨ̆qɴ] 'ant'

In these examples there is a mysterious barred-i that I couldn't explain. The reason I was questioning it was because these vowels are prounced very short. They are about half the duration of a typical high vowel – around 40 ms. Anyway, finally it dawned on meǃ In these words the vowel is occurring after l, d, and s respectively. It's occurring in the same environment as the word-final barred-i, namely after fricatives and voiced plosives. So underlyingly, in the speaker's mind, they are saying /jolfe/ and /bedlaq/ and /qosqɴ/ (as well as /qlistəl/), but the rules of his language dictate that he insert a barred-i after a syllable final fricative or voiced plosive.

I never expected Crystal's name to shed so much light on phonology.