AC3 and Ratonhnhaké:ton

[Torco]

So the main protagonist of the popular videogame Assasin's Creed 3 is a Mohawk and the voice actors speak Mohawk from time to time, and while I'm pretty ignorant regarding north american native langs it didn't sound like I thought mohawk sounded like: Wiki is unclear about this but I noticed that they pronounce the rhotic consonant as an approximant, as in English, and it seemed to lenite the k into g in the protagonis's name. Just a question for those that know more on this: is the english-style rhotic represented in the game an artifact of the voice actors probably being anglophones or did Mohawk really have an approximant rhotic <as opposed to, I guess what I thought it had, which is a trill or tap rhotic>

bit of video if you haven't played the game.

[Colonel Cathcart]

This stuck out to me too while playing that game. It's pretty clearly a retroflex [ɻ] rather than an alveolar [ɹ], which made me think Eastern Mohawk has /ɽ/ [ɻ], at least nowadays - I very much doubt they tried to reconstruct 18th century Mohawk phonology; it's not like us palefaces would know the difference. On the other hand, a few of the child characters have something like [ɻɾ] (in the hide-and-seek mission, note how they pronounce kaye:ri "four"), which seems like a more earnest approximation of [ɽ]. I don't know anything about Mohawk either, but my guess is that /ɽ/ was once a tap [ɽ], but possibly due to English influence it's taken an approximant quality, either [ɻ] or [ɻɾ] depending on dialect and/or morphophonemic context.

In the case of /k/ [g], IIRC Mohawk voices its stops initially and intervocalically, so <Ratonhnhaké:ton> is in fact [ɻadũn.haˈgeːdũ].

[Xephyr]

(Btw, there was another thread about this.)

[8Deer]

In the case of /k/ [g], IIRC Mohawk voices its stops initially and intervocalically, so <Ratonhnhaké:ton> is in fact [ɻadũn.haˈgeːdũ].

I think stops are voiced before any voiced sound, be it a vowel or resonant.

[Torco]

(Btw, there was another thread about this.)

didn't see it... sorry.