Small vowel inventories in North America

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Sumelic
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Re: Small vowel inventories in North America

Post by Sumelic »

The weird thing is that that Wikipedia article on Hupa doesn't list /e e:/ in the phonemic inventory, but they are listed in the "orthography" section and used in the example words.

CatDoom
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Re: Small vowel inventories in North America

Post by CatDoom »

Not sure what you mean; the table for Hupa Vowel Phonemes lists "ɪ ~ e", and notes that all of the vowels can be short or long. In any event, my statements were mostly based on notes I took a while back from Victor Golla's California Indian Languages, rather than on the Wikipedia articles I linked to. I really only added the links in order to give some context to people who might not have heard of some of the languages I mentioned.

Sumelic
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Re: Small vowel inventories in North America

Post by Sumelic »

What I mean is the orthography section distinguishes /ɪ/, /e/ and /e:/. No source lists long /ɪ:/, so it's clear that is not contrastive with long /e:/, but the situation with the short vowels is less clear. If /ɪ/ and /e/ are the same phoneme, it's odd that they are written with distinct letters, and there's no explanation of any conditions for allophony. The alphabet chart near the start of the Hupa Language Dictionary: Second Edition lists them separately. I read somewhere that /ɪ/ only occurs in closed syllables, but I'm not sure if that's true. In addition, from a glance at the dictionary entries, it seems like e' and eh are more common than i' and ih, so possibly [e] is an allophone of /ɪ/ in open syllables and before glottal consonants.

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