John Maidment's Blog

Shona, as you probably know, is a Bantu language spoken mainly in Zimbabwe, whose flag you can see to the left. There are also speakers in Zambia and other neighbouring states. Shona is famous (or should that be notorious?) for having so-called “whistle” fricatives. The voiceless one is written <sv> in the standard orthography of the language. Its voiced counterpart is written <zv>. So far, so good, though I should add that there are couple of corresponding affricates, written <tsv> and <dzv> respectively. Also <v> represents [w] rather than [v]. Shona has [v], but this is written <ṿ>. Still with me?

Both the Omniglot page and the Wikipedia entry for the language recognise that they are a bit out of their depth. One has to sympathise. When I was a postgraduate student at UCL in the 1970s I and all my fellow students failed to convince our fellow student, Alex Pongweni, a native Shona speaker, with our efforts to imitate his production of these dratted sounds.

Published descriptions all agree that these sounds involve multiple articulations, but they do not come to a consensus on what exactly is going on. One disagreement is as to whether they are double articulations, with friction noise being generated at two places simultaneously, or whether they are a primary articulation at the alveolar ridge with some sort of labial secondary articulation. The first of these ideas would lead to symbols such as [ɸ͡s] and [β͡z]. However, * and [zʷ], which is what the second idea implies, certainly would not have done for the sounds Alex Pongweni tried to get us to produce all that time ago.

* there should be s with superscript w here, but for some completely weird reason that combination refuses to display in my browser!

A few more uses of underlining in orthographies. They are all from North American languages.

The first, a rather puzzling one, is Tuscarora, spoken in Southern Ontario in Canada, and in New York State and North Carolina in the USA. The orthography used for this language contains <eh>. This represents the vowel [ə̃]. As the letter <h> is used to represent [h] and <e> to represent [ɛ], it’s a bit difficult to see the logic behind this.

Vancouver Island

The use of underlining in Kwakiutl orthography, on the other hand, is rather neat.  Kwakiutl, also known as Kwak’wala, is spoken in the northern part of Vancouver Island and also in adjacent areas on the mainland.  It has <a> = [ə], <k> = [q], <kw> = [qʷ], <k‘> = [qʼ], <k‘w> = [qʷʼ], <x> = [χ], and <xw> = [χʷ]. It seems likely that whoever devised the orthography knew a bit about phonetics and perhaps had the IPA retraction diacritic in mind in including the underlined symbols.

Another nice thing about this language is what the speakers of it call themselves: Kwakwaka’wakw [kʷakʷakaʔwakʷ], which means “speakers of Kwakiutl”.

The final two languages use underlining to indicate nasalisation of vowels. Chickasaw, spoken mainly in Oklahoma, has <a> = [ɑ̃, ə̃], <i> = [ĩ, ɪ̃], <o> = [ə̃ʊ̃], and <u> = [ũ, ʊ̃]. Choctaw, spoken in central Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennesee, is practically the same.