Ankle and Ute Breaking

(This post contains phonetic transcriptions. Consult the charts of the International Phonetic Association here for help if needed.)

In Ute the word for ‘ankle’ is the same as the word for ‘cartilage’: kɑ́ːʔjoχ. That’s pretty cool all by itself, and it explains why I had a such a hard time finding ‘ankle’ in my usual sources — I was looking in the wrong place.

But there’s also something special about the pronunciation of this word. In the current version of the Ute spelling system, kɑ́ːʔjoχ would be spelled kaa’yog(o). The second o is not always pronounced (which is why it’s in brackets), but we know it’s there.

How do we know it’s there if it isn’t pronounced? By a pretty regular rule of Ute, a vowel at the end of a word is not pronounced. For example, the word for ‘friend’ is tügüv(ü), pronounced tɯɣɯ́v, without the final vowel. Adding the possessive suffix -n ‘my’ yields tügüvün ‘my friend’. The last vowel of the word is no longer at the end of the word; the n is now at the end. So ‘my friend’ is pronounced tɯɣɯ́vʷɯn, with that last vowel in place.

Likewise, the last vowel of ‘ankle’, kaa’yog(o) should be pronounced when something like a possessive suffix is added at the end: kaa’yogon ‘my ankle’, or kaa’yogo’m ‘your (sg) ankle’. But here’s where it gets (even more) interesting. The possessed forms for ‘ankle’ that I actually hear are kɑ́ːʔjoʁwɯn ‘my ankle’ and kɑ́ːʔjoʁwɯʔm ‘your friend.’[1] These possessed forms seem to be based on an alternate version of the stem for ankle: kɑ́ːʔjoɣwɯ, with wɯ instead of o. So where did the wɯ come from?

In some varieties of Ute it’s quite common for o to be pronounced as we when it follows ɣ. The name of the town Towaoc (tójɑk in English) in southwestern Colorado comes from the Ute expression toʁójɑχ ‘It’s good’. However, the local Ute pronunciation of the word is actually toʁwéjɑχ, showing the alternation of o ~ we. You can also hear this alternation in words like toʁóɑv ~ toʁwéɑv ‘rattlesnake’ and mɑʁójʔi̥ ~ mɑʁwéjʔi̥ ‘blanket’. The switch-up between o and we is something I call Ute Breaking.[2] I first noticed it when I was visiting White Mesa, Utah, and talking to some Ute speakers there. They consistently pronounced we where other speakers of Ute pronounced o.

And now with the word for ‘ankle’ I have an example of the alternation of o ~ wɯ, which is very similar to the alternation of o ~ we. And because wɯ shows up in the possessed forms, we know that it is present in the stem; hence, kaa’yogo (or for Towaoc and White Mesa Ute kaa’yogwü). I expect that I’ll find additional examples as I become more familiar with vocabulary from all parts of Ute Country.[3]

Language Construction and "Rightness"

One of my hobbies is inventing languages. I’ve been doing it on and off since my senior year in high school, but I didn’t really get serious about it until I went to graduate school to study linguistics. Working on an invented language is an enjoyable way to spend an evening, though I don’t do it as much now as I used to. J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion, also invented languages as a hobby. In a famous essay called “A Secret Vice”, originally a lecture given at Oxford to the Samuel Johnson Society on 29 November 1931, he talked about the reasons he invented languages, chief among them the pleasure he derived from creating words and thinking about the new relationship between the sounds of the word and the meaning that the word was intended to convey. As he put it: “it is the contemplation of the relation between sound and notion which is a main source of pleasure.” (“A Secret Vice”, p 206)

I think for many of us who invent languages this is a strong motivation. There’s definitely a little thrill when you come up with a word that is just right for its intended meaning. For me, this sense of Rightness can also extend to phonological and grammatical systems themselves. There are many examples of grammatical and phonological phenomena from natural languages that I find enjoyable to think about: Frisian breaking, the Luiseño absolutive, and the auxiliary system of English, to name a few.

My current constructed language project is called Æppl (sounds like “apple”). It’s a silly name and I don’t remember how I came up with it, but it’s too firmly embedded in my imagination to change now. I imagine Æppl being spoken by about 55,000 people who live on an (imaginary) island about 350 miles east of Newfoundland.

I’ve been taking my time in constructing Æppl. I started thinking about it while taking the bus to and from work in the late 1990s, and I’m still thinking about it, almost 30 years later. I have some things about the language firm in my mind now, but the bulk of the language is still not worked out. In fact, very little of it is even written down. The process of writing something down makes it permanent in a way that I’m not always ready to commit to for Æppl, though there are a few things that have settled in and feel Right. Here are two of them.

1.  Æppl has 24 vowels altogether. There are 12 simple vowels /iː ɪ eː ɛ æ ə ɐ ɑ ɔ oː ʊ uː/, 8 falling diphthongs /iə̯ eə̯ uə̯ oə̯ ai̯ au̯ ɔi̯ eu̯/, and 4 rising diphthongs /i̯ɛ i̯æ u̯ɔ u̯ɑ/. This is the largest set of vowels I've ever worked with in a constructed language. I generally prefer smaller, lopsided vowel sets (/i a o/, /i e a o/, /i ɨ u o a/, etc), so ending up with a set this large is rather out of character for me. The vowels of Æppl have accumulated over the years, but the composition of the set as it is now feels good and I have no plans to change it.

I like playing around with different kinds of vowel charts. I’ve recently become enamoured of Geoff Lindsey’s triangular mapping of the acoustic vowel space; he explains it here. (Go ahead and take a look; it’s worth the time, and I’ll still be here when you’re done. You can even watch the video he made on the subject.) In fact, I liked it so much that I made a Lindseyan Triangle template in Adobe Illustrator for my own use and filled a copy with the simple vowels of Æppl.

The simple vowels of Æppl

I was engaged in blissful contemplation of the pseudo-analytical object I had just created, when I noticed that a particular set of vowels (/ɪ ə ɐ ʊ/) formed a Y-shape in the center of the chart, with /ǝ/ at the hub. I then realized that these 4 vowels were the only vowels that appeared in unstressed suffixes in Æppl.

Vowels in unstressed suffixes (in red)

The symmetry of this 4 vowel set in the chart coupled with the fact that the same vowels shared a unique (morpho-)phonological property struck me as being profoundly Right in a way that may be difficult for non-linguists to appreciate. I did not plan for those 4 vowels to share that property; that arose spontaneously. Perhaps you say, “Spontaneously? Really? Didn’t you choose the vowels for the particular suffixes at hand?” Well, yes; I did. Certainly I had made decisions about vowels in suffixes, some of them years ago, but I had made those decisions independently of each other and certainly not with an eye to creating larger, deeper connections such as the one I had found on that chart. But now that I’ve found this connection, I can’t imagine Æppl being any other way. The Rightness has become Inevitability.

2.  The main reason that it’s taking me so long to get anything done with Æppl is that I want decisions I make about it to have that feeling of Rightness (even Inevitability, if I can manage it). For that to happen, I need to sit with decisions for a while and just let them be. One of the decisions (or set of decisions) that I made early on was the structure of the auxiliary system. Auxiliaries in Æppl are small words that provide information about the sentence’s subject, tense, and mood. The auxiliary always follows the first word of the sentence. There are 3 sets of auxiliaries:

PRESENT	Singular	Plural
1	en	et
2	em	ep
3	es

PAST	Singular	Plural
1	ant	att
2	amt	apt
3	ast

FUTURE	Singular	Plural
1	eln	elt
2	elm	elp
3	els

It’s an orderly system, with several parallelisms built in:

• First person markers are alveolar /n t/, and second person person markers are labial /m p/.
• Singular number markers are nasals /n m/, and plural number markers are voiceless stops /t p/.
• The third person marker doesn’t distinguish number and is a fricative /s/ instead of a stop or nasal. (I suppose I should have used a velar fricative /x/ to distinguish it in place of articulation from first and second persons, but I’m happy enough with alveolar /s/.)
• Each person and number (PN) combination is phonotactically parallel with all of the others in the same tense — that is, it shows up in the same position in the auxiliary word. So present tense auxiliaries are |e-PN|, past tense auxiliaries are |a-PN-t|, and future tense auxiliaries are |e-l-PN|.

This used to bother me a bit, since it seemed too orderly — unnaturally orderly, even.

In Fall Semester 2021, I taught a field methods course in which the language under investigation was Bahasa Indonesia. While doing some background reading to prepare, I came across a table that showed common tense and mood distinctions in Austronesian languages as being the result of the intersection of more basic distinctions: whether an action or activity was started or not started, and whether an activity was finished or not finished. Here is a table that presents the features and their combinations, together with the labels for the resultant tense / mood categories:

	Finished	Not Finished
Started	Completive	Continuous
Not Started	(not defined)	Contemplative

The derived categories in this table are similar to the distinctions I had been making with the auxiliary system of Æppl, provided that one makes the following correspondences (not really much of a stretch):

Completive ≈ Past Tense

Continuous ≈ Present Tense

Contemplative ≈ Future Tense / Irrealis Mood

I then realized that these same basic distinctions (Started ~ Not Started; Finished ~ Not Finished) were already baked into my set of auxliaries:

Started is unmarked (Ø)

Not Started is marked by /l/

Finished is marked by /a ... t/

Not Finished is marked by /e/

The second person singular from each set of auxiliaries can be broken down as follows (this analysis assumes that the PN subject marker — in this case /m/ ‘2sg’ — is the stem of the construction):

amt /a- Ø- m -t/ ‘2sg.PAST’

em /e- Ø- m/ ‘2sg.PRES’

elm /e- l- m/ ‘2sg.FUT’

The other person and number combinations are parallel to the second person singular in formation.

For me, one of the most attractive features of the system is that there are three tenses, but only two basic categories. The intersection of the two categories produces the three-fold tense categorization I had settled on years ago, but as composite categories rather than primitive categories of the system. I didn’t plan it that way. But I’m glad now that I left the sets of auxiliaries alone for all those years, even though they seemed too tidy. They are tidy, but in a way that I never realized, and in a way that I now find very appealing — even Right. Maybe in another 25 years they’ll feel Inevitable, too. For now I’ll settle for Right.

Reading Goals and Big Books

Most years I set myself a reading goal. I keep track of the books I’d like to read in a spreadsheet, where I list the title, the author, the date I finished the book, and my rating (from 1 to 5). At the end of the year the books that I didn’t read roll over to next year’s list, while the books that I finished are removed to make room for new wanna-reads.

This year my goal is to read 24 books from the list of 60 or so on the spreadsheet. It’s a fairly modest goal. I’ve always enjoyed reading, but I don’t want it to become a chore. I have a lot of work-related reading that I have to do and which can take up quite a bit of time, and quite often I’d just rather watch TV and let my brain coast for a while. Even though my reading goal is modest, I’ve noticed that as the end of the year approaches I usually have to resort to reading the shorter books on the list in order to achieve it. This means that the longer books on my list tend not to get read. Now I like reading Big Books; Big Books don’t intimidate me. Of my Top 10 Favorite Books of All Time, about half of them are books that I would consider to be Big Books. So it’s a little disheartening that my reading goals would actually work to discourage me from reading them.

One year I didn’t set myself a reading goal. The idea was that I would then be free to read some Big Books that would otherwise remain unread out of worry that I wouldn’t reach my goal. But the result that year was that I actually read quite a bit less than usual, and the Big Books remained unread anyway. Clearly, some sort of accounting must be made for me to see progress.

As of today (10 November 2021), I’ve read 23 books, so I’m on track to achieve my reading goal for the year — as long as I finish a book before 31 December. But again, I’ve neglected the Big Books on my list. I obviously need a different kind of accounting so that the Big Books get some readerly love. So here’s what I’m going to do next year. Last night, I found the page counts of all of the books that I’ve read this year and included them in my spreadsheet. I then totaled up the page counts (9434 pages) and divided that total by the number of books I’ve read so far (23). This gave me an average book length of 410.2 pages. So rounding down a bit, a book typical of the sort that I’m inclined to read is 400 pages long or so, and 25 of them comes to 10,000 pages. So instead of reading 24 (or 25 or 30 or 40) books next year, my goal will be to read 10,000 pages. I think 10,000 pages is an easily achievable goal.

Now you may be thinking that depending on the publisher, genre, layout, etc., a page can have a greatly varying number of words on it, and that page count isn’t really a good guide to how much one has actually read — word count is obviously the count that matters. And you would be right. But the number of pages is a better metric than the number of books; and until publishers start reporting word count as well as page count in the metadata observable on online bookstores and other book-related websites, word count isn’t really a practical metric. I mean, I suppose I could count the number of words on a typical page of a book I want to read (or several pages and take an average) and then do the math myself (number of words per page multiplied by the number of pages). But that’s more work than I want to put into it — I do have my TV shows to keep up with, after all.

Going to the Library

I like going to the campus library. I like the short walk from my office to the building itself. I like browsing the stacks. I like that little flush of success when I’ve found the book I actually came in to find. I like talking to the library staff, attractive young people who are courteous and pleasant. I like the building itself. It is clean, well-furnished, and spacious, with lots of little corners containing study carrels and potted plants. I especially like the idea of a library. Having a cross-section of the collected knowledge of our civilization all in one place is a great thing.

So why are they trying to keep me from coming? While in the library today, I was reminded no less than twice that I didn’t have to come in – I could have the faculty delivery service bring the book(s) I want directly to my office. What’s the fun in that? I wouldn’t get to leave my office and walk to the library, roam the stacks, and enjoy that little frisson of accomplishment at having found the book myself, or be able to talk to those nice young people in case I need some help.

Maybe they’ll read a book to me over the phone if I ask them to, just as I’m going to sleep tonight. Then I won’t even have to hold it in my hands.

[This entry was originally a Facebook post from 1 September, 2010.]

An Astronomical Moment on my Morning Walk

I was on my daily walk this morning, walking due south along a suburban street in Spanish Fork. It was about 6:30 am. The sun hadn’t come up yet so it was still dark. I happened to look to my left, and I saw Venus rising over the mountains to the east. When I looked to my right, I could see Mars setting. And then I turned my face forward and looked up and and I saw Sirius directly in front of me. In that moment I felt … “triangulated,” like I was attached by strings to those celestial objects and pinned like a photograph on a TV detective’s cosmic cork board. I was moving at a fairly brisk pace, but I may as well have been on a giant treadmill, with the Earth rolling beneath me as I walked in place.

Entrata

When I was a junior in high school I heard this piece on the radio and was captivated by the repeating bass line ||: do _ re | do _ re :|| (I guess I was a minimalist even then). I later transcribed what I could remember of it (a brief stretch beginning around 0:41 in the recording linked below) in a notebook I carried around with me. In that notebook I titled it “Introit (Orff),” not realizing that it was actually an arrangement of William Byrd’s “The Bells.” I’ve thought about the piece off and on over the years. This morning I was thinking about it again and I finally found it — not “Introit” but “Entrata.” And just as wonderful as I remembered it.

Carl Orff, “Entrata”

[This entry was originally a Facebook post from 17 January, 2020.]

The Salt Lake City Public Library

I was struck this morning by a memory of going to the old SLC public library, when it occupied the building that now houses the Leonardo Museum. It was a late morning in the summer, probably a Saturday, and I was on the west side of the 5th floor where the music and art holdings were. I was sitting at a table thumbing through a copy of Steve Reich’s Writings about Music. I had just graduated from high school.

The southwest corner of the 5th floor was devoted to the library’s record collection. I listened to a lot of new music and even some recordings of Balinese gamelan (distributed by outfits like Nonesuch in their Explorer series). The guy at the desk, seeing that I was interested in new music, even made some suggestions: a mix of hits, like Pendercki (the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima was a sonic gut punch) and misses, like Xenakis (I still just can’t). That record collection is where I learned about music written after 1900.

Everything felt new, even though it was library-old. Even the dust motes lit by the sun coming in through the windows on the east side where there was a little courtyard with a pool.

Man, I miss that place.

The Day After Coming Home from a Big Trip

Yesterday afternoon we came home from a week-long trip to London, and I’m ready to go back. Or to go to New York. Or Amsterdam. Or Berlin. Or LA. Somewhere. Anywhere. This happens whenever I come back from a big trip: I feel a great need to go travel some more — to go do something somewhere else. And it doesn’t matter how long I’ve been gone. Three years ago, I co-directed our department’s Study Abroad program to the British Isles. It was 7 weeks of pretty stressful travel and teaching and riding herd on a group of students (who were actually really great), and when it was time to leave, I was happy to leave. But when I got home, I wanted to go somewhere else right away.

I don’t think it’s a desire to avoid my regular duties — at least not this time. My courses for Winter Semester are pretty much prepared and I have no big projects that have been on hold while I’ve been away. Speaking more generally, I’m not dissatisfied with how my life usually runs. I’ve got it pretty good. A family who I love and who loves me, a comfortable house, a good job that provides a steady income that meets our needs and allows us the occasional excursion, good friends, etc. All in all, a pretty sweet set-up.

I think I’ve just become accustomed to novelty. I spent a week walking down streets that are unfamiliar, eating food that tastes different, and listening to people who talk funny. Maybe I just want to keep doing and seeing new things. I was talking to Robert (the younger of my two sons) about it as we drove home yesterday, and I asked him what he thought a person from overseas would like to see and do if they came to where we lived. Pretty obviously it’s probably the kinds of things that they can’t see or do where they are from: the novelty of foreign places and people.

So if that’s the case, then maybe the answer for my need for novelty is to start looking for it in my everyday surroundings. I do live in a beautiful state and I should be taking advantage of it — visiting National (and State) Parks, going for hikes, attending cultural events close to home: galleries, concerts, lectures, etc.

Or I could get in the car and go somewhere Right Now. I know I really want to.

Summer Resolutions

The New Year has always struck me as a poor time to make resolutions or goals. For me as an academic, the New Year really starts at the end of August. But August is also a poor time to try to create new good habits; they just get overwhelmed by other things while I try to adjust to incoming students and new schedules. I want to begin creating good habits when I don’t have a lot of other things competing for my attention. So I’ve decided to start making Summer Resolutions to begin when Winter Semester is over (for us at BYU, that’s the end of April). I have some things I want to do this summer to make me into a better person than I am now. I’ve divided them into 4 areas: 1) physical, 2) mental, 3) spiritual, and 4) miscellaneous.

Physical

I’m not in good physical condition. I started running a few years ago, but I haven’t done it regularly enough to really see the long term benefits. I’m running again now, but I need to get serious about it. So I’m resolving to increase my runs over the summer to at least 6 miles at a time. I’m not really interested in training for a marathon or such nonsense (those people are crazy), but I need to exert myself more than I’m doing now. Besides, people tell me that running is fun. I’m looking forward to finding out if that’s true.

Mental

Since I am an academic by profession, this might seem to be the easiest one to accomplish. But I’ve noticed myself becoming intellectually lazy over the past couple of years; I’m not stretching myself to learn new things or to write up things I’ve already learned to share with colleagues at conferences and in publications. My research program has stalled. I have plans but lately no desire to actually do anything about them. That needs to change, and this summer is as good a time as any. Here are a couple of things I want to do:

• Learn Nahuatl. Almost 20 years ago I participated in a Nahuatl reading group. The leader of the reading group was trying out a new Nahuatl textbook and I thought it sounded like fun. The textbook wasn’t that good, and I remember next to nothing about the language. Now I’ve got a better textbook and a summer to work on it.
• Shoshoni Phonology Book. This is the summer when I get serious about writing a book about Shoshoni Phonology. I’ve been thinking about doing it for 15 years now; it’s time to stop thinking about it and start doing it. It will also be a good way to start generating some material to submit to conferences and journals — to get back into the game.

Spiritual

This is private. Suffice it to say that I’ve been on a (pretty low) spiritual plateau for quite a while. I’ve got to move myself off of this plateau to higher ground. This will be a good summer to start.

Miscellaneous

I have a couple of other goals and resolutions for myself this summer that don’t fit neatly into these categories. One involves refurbishing a pump organ I bought two and a half years ago. It works, barely. It will be a long project, and I’ll probably screw it up. But then I’ll fix it and hopefully learn something. I’m not very handy with tools, in spite of having a craftsman for a father. I didn’t pay enough attention to what he was doing while I was growing up, so now I’ll have to learn the hard way. I’m sure Dad will be willing to offer his advice, but it’s my project now.

Even if I don’t accomplish all of my goals or habits, I’m hoping that the process will have some beneficial effects. If nothing else, it will keep me aware of some of my shortcomings (thus inspiring some humility, which I need) and motivate me to be better than I was before.

Hopi and the Deseret Alphabet*

In the fall of 1859, Jacob Hamblin and six other men left their homes in what is now southwestern Utah and traveled to the Hopi villages on the southern tips of Black Mesa. The purpose of the trip was to establish good relations with the Hopis and learn their language with an eye to translating the Book of Mormon and bringing the Hopis into the fold of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the “Mormons”). Two of the men, Thales Haskell and Marion Jackson Shelton, ended up in Oraibi, a village on what is called the Third Mesa. They would spend a total of four months there, living and working with the Hopis.

English Phonotypic Alphabet 1847

We know about their time in Oraibi because Thales Haskell kept a journal. It’s pretty interesting reading, provided you can read the Deseret Alphabet.[1] The Deseret Alphabet was all the rage at the time. Or at least spelling reform was. Sir Isaac Pitman (of shorthand fame) developed several versions of a “Phonetic Alphabet” with the goal of reforming English spelling. The Pitman orthographies were based on the traditional Roman alphabet, with modified characters added to fill out the range of symbols needed to adequately represent English sound structure.

The Deseret Alphabet

Brigham Young and other Church leaders thought that orthography reform would be a good idea for the Church as well. In fact, they were on the verge of adopting a Pitmanesque Phonetic Alphabet when Willard Richards called a halt to it, declaring it to be “new wine in old bottles.” His objection was that using traditional characters (however modified) would be confusing, and what was needed was a clean break; nothing less than a brand new set of symbols would do. George D. Watt took up the challenge and produced the Deseret Alphabet.


All of this is well known by historians who have an interest in the Deseret Alphabet. What is not as well known is that the Deseret Alphabet was also used to transcribe foreign languages for pedagogical use. Haskell’s companion, Marion Jackson Shelton, used the Deseret Alphabet to write out an English-Hopi vocabulary list during their time in Oraibi. There are 486 entries, and it shows some interesting things about the state of the Hopi language at the time.

For me the most interesting thing that Shelton’s Vocabulary shows us has to do with a fine phonetic distinction made in Third Mesa Hopi. Unlike the other dialects of Hopi, that of the Third Mesa has developed tone; it thus joins other world languages like Mandarin, Thai, and Hausa in using the pitch at which words are pronounced as important cues to their meaning. It’s been the source of some speculation as to how tone originated in Hopi. Using traditional linguistic reconstruction methods, Alexis Manaster-Ramer in a 1986 paper[3] posited the existence of a set of consonants that caused the pitch of the voice to fall on the vowel just before the consonant. One of these consonants is /h/. This /h/ was eventually dropped in Third Mesa speech, leaving behind only the falling pitch as evidence that it was ever there. At least, this is Manaster-Ramer’s story.[4]

Hopi girl (photo by Edward Curtis)

In Shelton’s Vocabulary, we clearly see many entries with the syllable final /h/ that have since disappeared.[5] Two entries in particular are especially important—the entries for ‘little boy’ and ‘little girl’. In modern Third Mesa Hopi, these words are tiyòoya and manàwya, respectively (the grave accents show the falling tone). In Second Mesa Hopi, they are tiyohoya and manahoya. From these examples and others like them, we can reconstruct a diminutive suffix *-hwya for a pre-modern version of Hopi, which through various sound changes gives us the range of variation we see in the modern language (-hoya ~ -wya ~ -ya).

In the Vocabulary, ‘little boy’ and ‘little girl’ are given as <ti.o.hwi.yʌ> and <mɑ.nɑ.hwi.yʌ>. The diminutive ending is clearly <-hwiyʌ>, which is as good a match as you can hope for to the hypothetical *-hwya. And that’s what makes my toes tingle. The hypothetical reconstructed form isn’t hypothetical anymore: it’s right there in the Vocabulary where we can read it. And it clearly has an /h/, so Manaster-Ramer’s story about the origin of Third Mesa Hopi falling tone isn’t just a convenience to explain a divergent dialect: it’s rooted in fact. And we know about it now because Shelton wrote it down, and he used the Deseret Alphabet to do it.

Many in and out of the Church have regarded the Deseret Alphabet as nothing more than a historical curiosity—something that certifies the weirdo status of those wacky 19th century Mormons. But in Shelton’s Vocabulary we see it providing part of serious documentation of an indigenous language now in decline; a 150 year old aural snapshot of a lost time.

Contemporary view from Oraibi (photo by JaumeBG)

[*] This post is based on a forthcoming book that I coauthored with Kenneth R. Beesley. (Beesley, Kenneth R. and Dirk Elzinga. 2015. An 1860 English-Hopi Vocabulary Written in the Deseret Alphabet, University of Utah Press.) My thanks to Jeremy Grimshaw for his careful reading and suggestions that improved this essay.

[1] He later transcribed (and lightly edited) his journal into standard English spelling, which was then edited and published by Juanita Brooks in 1944. That’s probably the version you’ve seen—if you’ve seen it. Haskell’s original DA journal is in Special Collections at the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU.

[2] This is the later, 38-letter version. The version discussed here is older, and had two additional letters: OY (boy) and YU (use).

[3] Manaster-Ramer, Alexis. 1986. Genesis of Hopi Tones. International Journal of American Linguistics 52.2. pp 154-60.

[4] When linguists don’t have written records to help illuminate earlier stages of a language, we have to resort to inferences based on evidence from contemporary language usage, often with an assist from diverging dialects. This is what Manaster-Ramer did in his 1986 paper.

[5] There are also many words where we might expect an /h/ but don’t get one; Shelton was a decent field linguist, but even the best of us miss stuff. The Deseret Alphabet also got in his way. It was intended to write English, after all, and Hopi is very different from English.

Things I've Learned on Vacation

I've been in Minnesota for the past week or so, and here are some things I've learned:

1.  There are places in the world where the ambient color really is green. (I already knew this, but every time I come to Minnesota I'm confronted with this reality again.)

2.  If your kid has to have his appendix out, Ridgeview Medical Center in Waconia, MN is not a bad place to get it done.

3.  Coffee shops sell more than coffee. In particular, the smoothies at Caribou Coffee are outstanding. (This one's a shout-out to my FiL, who is a dedicated coffee drinker and one of the most social persons I know.)

4.  It's probably for the best that we don't have Half Price Books in Utah County. I spent all of my trip allowance--and then some--buying books there (with an assist from Magers and Quinn). It wasn't even hard to do.

5.  As impressive as it is, the Mall of America is really just a great big shopping mall. I've been twice now, and I don't think I need to go again.

6.  A cross-country road trip isn't the only way to get somewhere, but with the right people it's a lot of fun. And my family is definitely the right people. Thanks, guys.

Gallstones

Last Tuesday (28 May) I woke up at 3:00 am with really bad heartburn. I was sure it was the ice cream, and Laura was sure it was the cilantro (!). We both decided that it must be cilantro. So I spent the rest of the week moping around the house because I wasn't getting better. We finally went to the ER Saturday night (1 June) and we were both wrong: it was  gallstones. Two were in the bile duct, and that was causing the pain and heartburn. They removed them early Sunday morning, and I was admitted. Today I had my gallbladder removed. We had to wait until today because I got pancreatitis from the gallstone removal (the MD had to put a stent in the pancreatic bile duct, and the pancreas is a touchy organ). And that meant no eating or drinking anything: I've been having all of my nutritional needs met from a plastic bag draining into a vein. This morning the gallbladder was removed, and I feel tons better. There is still a little bit of inflammation in the pancreas, but it's gone way down. I have pictures of the gallstones, but I won't post those (eww).

Timpanogos and Numic borrowing

Today’s Ute Word of the Day is nukwi [nuˈkʷi], a verb that means ‘flow, run’. It is typically used to describe running water. I have always thought that the name ‘Timpanogos’ had this word as one of its elements, but now I’m not completely sure (I’m still pretty sure). If ‘Timpanogos’ is in fact from Ute, it would break down as: tïm(-pi) ‘rock’ + pa(a) ‘water’ + nogo-tsï ‘running’, yielding tïmpanogotsï “rock water running”.[1]

The differences between nukwi and nogo are pretty standard Numic stuff. In all of the Numic languages there is some indeterminacy regarding the quality of the vowel found in the first syllable of words like nukwi; sometimes it’s heard as [u], and other times it’s heard as [o]. So the variation between nu- and no- is expected.

The variation between the voiceless stop [k] and the voiced fricative [ɣ] (which I’m writing as g in the practical orthography) is also found in all of the Numic languages and has been grammaticized in some of them as verbal aspect, with one alternant signifying progressive or durative and the other something like momentaneous.

The variation between wi and final o is also not uncommon and is found in Central Numic (Timbisha, Shoshone, Comanche) as well as in Ute. I assume that o is the result of coalescence of wi, so wi should be considered the older form. The w, which really is just lip-rounding on the k, is in turn the result of coarticulation from the preceding u. This means that the form nukwi would have originally been *nuki. Central Numic has just this form (usually written nukki) with the more generic meaning ‘run’.

The suffix -tsï is probably an active participle suffix with a function similar to that of English -ing. It has various forms in Ute: -tï, -rï, and -chï/-tsï, with the latter variant found following a stem-final i. So ‘Timpanogos’ lines up very neatly as a word that comes from Ute.

However, all of its parts are also found in Shoshone (Central Numic). The word for ‘rock’ in Shoshone is tïm(-pi), just as in Ute; the word for ‘water’ is also paa, and the word for ‘run’ is also nukki (as discussed above). Shoshone also has a verbal suffix -tï, with a meaning similar to that of Ute. (The Shoshone -tï doesn’t have -tsï as one of its variants, however.) So the name ‘Timpanogos’ could also claim a Shoshone origin, though the claim isn’t perhaps as strong.[2]

This hints at a larger problem encountered by those of us working with Numic languages. Historically, there was extensive contact between speakers of neighboring Numic languages, and as all historical linguists know, one of the results of contact is borrowing. In this case, it is perfectly reasonable to assume borrowing between Shoshone and Ute. It is well established that the Goshutes, who speak a variety of Shoshone, interacted regularly with the Utes around Utah Lake. But how would we know that such borrowing took place? As I’ve shown above, all of the elements of the name ‘Timpanogos’ are present in Ute and Shoshone. While I think it most likely that ‘Timpanogos’ is a Ute word, I can't be 100% sure. And this isn’t the only case; ask me sometime about Panguitch and sego lilies.


[1] It probably referred to the Provo River rather than the mountain itself, but that’s just my opinion.

[2] One thing strengthening the claim (if only by a little bit) for a Shoshone origin of ‘Timpanogos’ is the fate of syllable-final nasals in Ute. In Ute, syllable-final nasals (like the m in ‘Timpanogos’) were lost; the word for ‘rock’ is actually tïpwi. (The w of tïpwi is the result of coarticulation from ï. Really.) If ‘Timpanogos’ came from Ute, it must have done so before the loss of syllable-final nasals. Alternatively, the word is actually from Shoshone, which has not lost syllable-final nasals.

UPDATE (31 March 2014): I’ve been meaning to get to this update for quite a while now. I was reminded not long after publishing the original post that Northern Ute still retains syllable final nasals that southern Ute varieties have lost, so tïm-pi ‘rock’ is a perfectly reasonable Ute word and pretty much clinches the case for the Ute origin of Timpanogos.

UPDATE 2 (21 August 2014): I was browsing the Domínguez/Escalante journal (edited by Ted J. Warner and translated by Fray Angelico Chavez) this morning and came across the name that the expedition members gave to Utah Valley: Valle de Nuestra Señora de la Merced de los Timpanocuitzis. What was interesting in the context of this blog post was the name ‘Timpanocuitzis’. The verb stem nokwi is clearly visible through the Spanish spelling conventions and provides an extra data point regarding the variation between nogo and nukwi I discussed above.

I love being a linguist.

Piimihchi

Today’s Ute Word of the Day is piimihchi [ˈpiːmi̥tʃi] ‘love’. Another way to say ‘love’ in Ute is tïï asïhti’i [tɨː ˈasɨ̥tiʔi], which is literally ‘well’ + ‘like’, or “like a lot”. These words give me an opening to talk about voiceless vowels in Ute and how I’ve chosen to represent them in the practical orthography I’m working on. But first a confession: in both of these words I cheated a little; the voiceless vowels aren’t really there (as far as I can tell), so the transcriptions are more accurately [ˈpiːmtʃi] and [tɨː ˈastiʔi]. This would lead to orthographic forms piimchii and tïï asti’i. So why put in the voiceless vowels if they’re not pronounced? The answer has to do with syllable structure and phonotactics, and the history of the language.

Ute is a Numic language, most closely related to Paiute, and more distantly related to Shoshone and Comanche. All of these languages have fairly simple syllable structure: a syllable consists minimally of a single vowel or diphthong. This vowel or diphthong may be introduced by a single consonant. It may also be followed by a single consonant, provided that 1) that consonant is /ʔ/ or /h/, or 2) it is a nasal consonant (/m, n, ŋ/) that shares its place of articulation with a following consonant. These syllable structure restrictions seem to apply to the Numic languages generally.

One place where these restrictions seem to relax a bit is with voiceless vowels. A voiceless vowel is, as its name suggests, a vowel without any vocalization or voicing. Voiceless vowels are variants of regular vowels. Certain conditions must apply for a vowel to become voiceless. Typically, the vowel must be unstressed and short. Additionally, voiceless vowels show up in word-final position or before voiceless consonants like /p/, /t/, /k/, and /s/. Voiceless vowels are not universal in Numic languages, but they are common; indeed, Paiute and Comanche are well known among linguists for having voiceless vowels.

Ute also has voiceless vowels, and the conditions under which they can appear in speech are roughly those described above. However, in Ute voiceless vowels are sometimes dropped altogether and not pronounced at all. Whether a vowel is dropped or not depends on a number of factors, including the quality of the vowel (it happens to /ɨ/ more frequently than to /a/, for example) and the dialect or speech habits of the speaker. Final voiceless vowels are more frequently dropped than voiceless vowels in other positions, though as today’s Word of the Day shows, it can happen in the middle of a word as well. The dropping of a final voiceless vowel may occur so frequently with a particular word that it becomes impossible to know which vowel was originally there. In that case, the vowel is lost. An unrecoverable dropped vowel can’t be written in a practical orthography.

But other dropped vowels can be recovered; here’s an example. The object form of nouns in Ute and Paiute were originally formed by adding the suffix *-a. When voiceless vowels began to be dropped word-finally, the suffix disappeared. But the vowel at the end of the noun stem was still pronounced. Historically, the object form of the word ‘boy’ was *aːpatʃi-a. When the final vowel became voiceless and dropped off, the object form became /aːpatʃi/. The subject form of the same word was historically *aːpatʃi. After its final vowel became voiceless and dropped off, it became /aːpatʃ/. Some speakers still pronounce the final vowel, so for them it’s [aːpatʃi̥]. In the practical orthography, this would be written as aapachih. The final vowel of ‘boy’ isn’t always pronounced, but it is recoverable because it pops up again in the object form.

We’re not always so lucky to have object forms to help recover dropped vowels. But sometimes comparison with other dialects and closely related Paiute can show us what vowel was there originally. But first, a question. How do we know that the underlined vowel in piimihchi or tïï asïhti’i was there to begin with? We know that because of what we know about syllable structure constraints in Ute and other Numic languages. Recall that syllables have a simple structure: there’s a vowel and maybe one consonant before it and one consonant after it. The consonant following the vowel could only be /h/, /ʔ/ or a nasal consonant that agreed in its place of articulation with a following consonant. Now look again at asïhti’i, pronounced as [ˈastiʔi]. The consonant /s/ agrees with /t/ in place of articulation, but it isn’t a nasal, nor is it /ʔ/ or /h/. So this is a likely place for a voiceless vowel to have been dropped. Looking in Sapir’s dictionary of Southern Paiute, we find ’ac·ïntu’i, ‘to like, to want’, which we would transcribe today in IPA as /ʔaʃːɨntuʔi/. The resemblance with /astiʔi/ isn’t accidental; these words are cognates. Southern Paiute has the vowel /ɨ/ in the second syllable. This vowel apparently became voiceless and then dropped out in Ute. But it’s recoverable if we look at the Paiute cognate. For this reason, I represent [ˈastiʔi] as asïhti’i in the practical orthography.

For piimihchi, pronounced as [ˈpiːmtʃi], it’s a little trickier. The nasal consonant /m/ doesn’t agree with the affricate /tʃ/, so this is also a likely place for a voiceless vowel to have been dropped. This word is unique to Ute, which means that there are no cognates in related languages to help recover the vowel. In Givón’s 1979 dictionary of Southern Ute, he shows pi?ímhci under the entry for ‘love’. This would be transcribed in IPA as [piˈʔimV̥tʃi]. The underlined h represents a voiceless vowel of undetermined quality. So there is evidence of a voiceless vowel; it's just a guess on my part that it’s [i̥].

These might seem like weak reasons to insert vowels that aren’t pronounced at all. And it might turn out that speakers who take the time to learn to read and write using this orthography will simply not write the vowels. If that’s the case, then fine. But I hope that by including the vowels now, the orthography may become useful beyond White Mesa in places where these vowels (and others like them) are still pronounced. We’ll have to see what happens.

UPDATE (20 February 2013): I found the verb sųtí?i [sɨ̥ˈtiʔi] ‘feel, sense’ in Givón’s 1979 dictionary. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to relate this verb with [ˈastiʔi] ‘like, want’, giving a little more support to the inclusion of the voiceless vowel ïh in the spelling of [ˈastiʔi] as asïhti’i.

UPDATE (8 September 2022): In Givón's 2016 dictionary (a revision and expansion of his 1979 dictionary) I find: piyɵmichi- [piˈjœmi̥tʃi-] v-tr 'love', 'care for', 'cherish'. So now I know. The voiceless vowel is in fact an /i/. I don't hear the stretch -iyɵ- as anything but a long /iː/, though.

Ute Word of the Day

In my previous post, I alluded to the "Ute Word of the Day." Every weekday I post a different Ute word from my files on Facebook and Google+. Most of them are words that I have collected and recorded during field work in White Mesa, Utah. Some of them are from a preliminary version of the White Mesa Ute Dictionary, prepared by Brian Stubbs working with elders from the White Mesa Ute community. This is a little something I do to motivate myself to keep working on the sound files containing these words. Documenting minority and endangered languages is important work, but it can also be tedious. Posting a Ute Word of the Day lets me try out and refine ideas for my practical orthography, and the posts usually generate comments concerning pronunciation and etymology; the conversation keeps me excited about doing the work.

In case you've missed them, past Words of the Day include:

11 January 2013: pahsagwov [pḁˈsaɣʷɔv̥] noun eye boogers
14 January 2013: sihkuchih [s̩ˈkutʃi̥] noun Abert’s squirrel (Sciurus aberti) 
15 January 2013: muhkwi’ya [m̥u̥ˈkʷiʔjæ] verb come to a sharp point (inanimate object)
16 January 2013: magwei’ih [maˈʁʷeiʔi̥] noun blanket
17 January 2013: Nuuchiun [ˈnuːtʃiũ] noun (pl) Ute people; Indian people
18 January 2013: komö’ni [qoˈmøʔni] verb turn around
21 January 2013: togwei [toˈʁʷei] verb be right, correct; be well
22 January 2013: kwïhchikuhchapïh [kʷɨ̥ˈtʃiku̥tʃapʰ] noun headband
23 January 2013: pagï [paˈɣɨ] noun fish
24 January 2013: aapachih [ˈaːpɐtʃi̥] noun boy
25 January 2013: sakïi [saˈkɨi] verb limp; be lame
28 January 2013: tïhkakunav [tɨ̥ˈkakunav̥] noun lunch sack
29 January 2013: chïhkwi’napïh [tʃɨ̥ˈkʷiʔnapɨ̥] noun key
30 January 2013: kanavïh [kaˈnav̥] noun willow; riverbank rush
31 January 2013: pö’öi [pøˈʔøi] verb write
 

Neyanwahke

Today's Ute Word of the Day (1 February 2013), Neyanwahke [neˈjãw̃ḁkɛ] 'Handgame', presents a puzzle for a practical orthography of Ute. In Sapir's description of Southern Paiute, the stem naiyáŋwi- 'handgame' contains a labiovelar nasal (ŋw = /ŋʷ/). In Ute, the labiovelar nasal corresponds to (heavy) nasalization of the first vowel in a vowel cluster. So vowel nasalization is important in Ute and ought to be represented in a practical orthography. In the practical orthography for White Mesa Ute that I'm developing, my first solution for representing vowel nasalization was to follow the vowel with n (e.g., Nuuchiun [nuːtʃiũ] 'Ute people; Indian people', the Ute Word of the Day for 17 January). This parallels my treatment of voiceless vowels as a vowel followed by h. The trailing h for voiceless vowels works because /h/ is otherwise unattested as a consonant phoneme of Ute, so there's no ambiguity: Vh is always and only a voiceless vowel. However, /n/ is amply attested as a consonant phoneme in Ute, so ambiguity could arise in sequences of orthographic VnV: is it [ṼV] or [VnV]? However, in all of the words that I can find with vowel nasalization, the vowel is back and round (/u/ or /o/), or, as in the present case, it is followed by /w/--either nasalized [w̃] or plain [w]. So my current thinking is to use Vn(V) when the vowel is round and Vnw(V) elsewhere. Alternatively, I could use Vnw(V) in all cases (except word-finally; in those cases a trailing n seems sufficient). 

Do my Numicist friends have any thoughts?

Sitting in the Back Row

This semester I joined the gamelan ensemble here at BYU, the Gamelan Bintang Wahyu. The instruments are mainly percussion--bronze-keyed instruments that look something like glockenspiels or xylophones, cradled in ornately carved, gilt wooden frames. There are also gongs, drums, flutes and stringed instruments. Gamelans are very popular in Indonesia (especially on the islands of Bali and Java), and versions of them are found throughout Southeast Asia.

A typical piece of music for Balinese gamelan has a single melodic line at its core. The smaller, higher-pitched instruments cooperatively play a highly elabororated version of the melody, while the larger, lower-pitched instruments play a simplified version and act somewhat like timekeepers for the ensemble. Gongs punctuate the ends of cycles, and the flutes and stringed instruments add color to the melody, which they play along with the central percussion instruments. The performers playing the drums set the tempo and signal tempo changes.

I sit on the back row and play one of the larger instruments. Being on the back row is a pretty easy gig, just right for someone like me who is new to the whole thing. You play a note every other beat or every four beats or so and just coast along. You don’t have to think hard or even pay much attention to what’s going on. At least, that’s what I thought until a couple of weeks ago. One day in rehearsal I realized that I had a pretty good vantage point from which to hear the whole ensemble; I could hear how all of the parts fit together, and I could let the sound just wash over me. It was kind of exhilarating.[1]

I’ve been thinking ever since about what it means to sit on the back row. Typically the kids on the back row are the ones who are disengaged. They’re the trouble makers, flipping paper footballs into the front of the room and generally goofing around. They don’t pay attention, and their grades show it. But in every class there’s at least one student who really is paying attention, who is completely there. She isn’t just coasting; she’s totally involved, letting the material wash over her, trying to figure out how it all fits together.

That wasn’t me when I was in school. I was (and am) a front row kind of guy. I wanted to suck everything out of the lecture (and lecturer) that I could and not be distracted by the clowns in the back. I was aggressively active in class and raised my hand frequently. I suppose that in my mind, class wasn’t successful if I hadn’t asked a question or answered one posed by the instructor. It seemed to work for me; I got good grades, I got to know a lot of teachers fairly well, and I enjoyed my educational experience, for the most part. But on that day in rehearsal a few weeks ago, I realized that I rarely (if ever) take the opportunity to sit in the back to see what’s going on.

Now before this turns into an essay extolling the virtues of a life of contemplation, let me reassure you: I have no intention of sitting quietly on the back row for the rest of my life, either in gamelan or anywhere else. But for those of us who, like me, are used to being heard and expect to be paid attention to, it can be refreshing to just shut up for a while, sit in the back and try to figure out what’s going on.

I’m sure I’ll be surprised at what I’ll learn.

[1] To be fair, it was a realization that was pointed out to me by our director, Jeremy Grimshaw, who also enjoys sitting on the back row for these very reasons.

Writing

I am become an indifferent blogger. I'm not really surprised at that; I don't really enjoy writing that much, and there isn't a lot that I feel a strong need to share with the world. To be sure, I have opinions; but an opinion and a quarter might get you a gumball.

But I find that I'm writing all the time. My professional advancement requires that I write and publish scholarly articles and books. I don't actually mind that kind of writing; as long as I'm sure about my facts and confident in my analysis of them, I can write all day long. It's personal, non-obligatory writing that is so difficult for me. So why did I ever think I would succeed with a blog, which is exactly the kind of writing I find so difficult? Who knows. I suppose blogging is like gardening; I hate doing it, but I love fresh vegetables.

Pandering and Bigotry

Now that I've got your attention, read this article. It's not long; I'll wait until you're done.

http://desne.ws/rsRIkO

Now there are a lot of questions that remained unanswered. Why did the professor leave a tenured position at Houston? What exactly was the understanding between him and the administration concerning his "one-year probationary period"? And so on. But the heart of the story is troubling. He was denied tenure after complaints from students that the courses he taught were "too rigorous" and that "he did not know how to teach because he was blind". I don't know which I find more offensive: the overt bigotry or the pandering to underachievers.

When I was an undergraduate, I took several linguistics courses because I thought I would like the subject, and I was right. I went through the usual core courses: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax (did a couple of those), and so on. But I didn't really get fired up about the subject until I took Phonological Theory from S,[1] a graduate assistant who was finishing her Ph.D. It was technically not her course; it was a graduate course (but open to advanced undergrads), so on the books it had to be taught by a regular faculty member. But no one on the faculty at the time was able to teach the subject, so S taught it. It was an eye-opening experience. Linguistic theory is rather esoteric at the best of times, and phonology is no exception. My brain got wrinkled almost daily. I had never worked so hard in a linguistics course before, and I loved it. It was challenging, rigorous (there's that word again), and S clearly knew her stuff and what she was doing.

She also happened to be blind.

I am forever grateful to S for not pulling her punches in presenting course material, or in her evaluation of our performance on homework, exams and our final paper. That course decided my professional trajectory; it is because of it--and her--that I am a phonologist today. (I later got a job reading for her--dozens of articles from linguistics journals. That by itself was an education.)

So for all of you UVU whiners who got this guy fired: You should be ashamed of yourselves. Sack up and get to work. We are in the middle of one of the worst economic crap storms that has ever hit our country. We desparately need people who know their stuff and who aren't afraid of a challenge. If you're not up to it, don't blame the blind guy who's making you work hard in class. Get out of the way and make room for those who can handle it.

And for the UVU administration (at least the bean-counters who denied tenure) and the lawyers in the Attorney General's office: Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right. Your legal asses may be covered, but you have done your students a disservice. You may think that your students are your customers, but you're wrong. The future employers of your students are your customers. If you deliver an inferior product, you'll soon be irrelevant, and employers will look to other schools for new hires. You're a young school; don't start off this way.

[1] I'll use just an initial to protect her privacy; all of this praise would probably embarrass her.