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.

On 8 March 2008 I wrote a short blog on Kāi Tahu Māori. You can see the complete post on this page. In that post I made two claims which I repeat here for convenience:

The letter k used to write KTM is unique in two respects. (1) it is the only orthographic symbol which incorporates underlining. (2) it is used to reference two different dialects of a language — in effect it means a [k] sound, which in other types of Māori is an [ŋ] sound.

(2) above I still believe to be true, but (1) definitely is not.

Having been trawling through Omniglot, I have come across a handful of languages which use a Latin-based script and which use underlining for various purposes.

For instance, a few Native American languages which indicate voiceless vowels this way. An example is Comanche which has voiceless versions of all its six vowels <a e i o u ʉ> (the last represents [ə]). So <a> = [ḁ], <e> = [e̥] etc.

More on this another time.

I was asked recently by a friend to try and identify this language. I failed, though he and I had sort of narrowed it down to a South American language. He finally found out from another source that it is Sibundoy (also known as Camsá, Kamsá, Kamse, Kamemtxa, Coche, Camëntsëá….) a language isolate of Colombia. As you can see from the text, it has some surprising features.

First, I know of no other language whose orthography contains <s̈>. From the only site I have found that gives any phonetic/phonological details of the language, this appears to represent a voiceless retroflex fricative [ʂ]. I suppose that makes some sort of sense. Apparently, retroflex consonants are by no means common in Colombian indigenous languages. Sibundoy also has [ʈʂ].

Here is the complete phonological inventory, as far as I know it.

Vowels:

The <ë> in the text represents [ɨ], but I don’t know what the <ÿ> (another orthographic oddity) or the <á> mean.

Consonants:

Finally, the word-initial clusters <tc> and<tb> (if that is really what they are) seem mighty strange to me.

If anyone can throw any more light on any of this, I would be very grateful.