Mohawk: Voicing or Aspiration?
Here's what I've been obsessing over this week: Mohawk onsets.
Recently I did some quick transcription work for the final score of an opera that contained some Mohawk text [The Captivation of Eunice Williams --- if you're in Washington, DC this weekend you should go see it at the National Museam of the American Indian] and as a result I have a recording of native speakers uttering the relevant words and phrases.
When I did the transcription, I was fairly certain that there was an alternation between voicless aspirated and voiceless unaspirated stops (my final version represented the latter as voiced for the ease of the mostly-English-speaking singers who would be encountering this score). This week I spent some time glancing through some of the relevant literature on the topic, and everything I've seen suggests that this has been treated as a voicing alternation. I've also been listening very closely to my data, and I'm still convinced that, with the possible exception of intervocalic voicing, it's actually an alternation of aspiration.
I think the next step is to run the files through praat and actually measure voice onset time, but this brings up something I've been thinking about lately with respect to field work and phonology, and how important it is to make careful transcriptions and audio recordings.
Operating under the assumption that I'm correct (which may or may not be a valid assumption), it seems like this is a case where a native speaker of a language that didn't distinguish aspiration from voicing made the transcriptions, and wrote down what they heard. Phonologists ever since have been trusting that transcription, which may or may not be accurate. Fortunately there are still native speakers of Mohawk; and with sufficient time, resources, and permission I could collect new data to analyze. This is not true of, for example, Klamath. While there may be a few relatively proficient speakers left, there are no longer any native speakers. Phonologists must rely exclusively on transcriptions done by M.A.R. Barker (the audio recordings are degrading rapidly and can no longer be played reliably) --- said transcriptions are highly detailed and probably very accurate, but if he missed a relevant detail or distinction (such as only recording stress on a handful of examples) there's really nothing we can do about it.
Of course, it wouldn't be practical for a phonologist to collect fresh data every time there's an interesting question to investigate. We have to rely on the results of fieldwork, and we have to trust that transcriptions are accurate. We also need to remember that sometimes transcriptions aren't accurate, and that sometimes finding something entirely unexpected (such as a language that appears to prohibit voiceless onsets) means we should take another look at the data.
Recently I did some quick transcription work for the final score of an opera that contained some Mohawk text [The Captivation of Eunice Williams --- if you're in Washington, DC this weekend you should go see it at the National Museam of the American Indian] and as a result I have a recording of native speakers uttering the relevant words and phrases.
When I did the transcription, I was fairly certain that there was an alternation between voicless aspirated and voiceless unaspirated stops (my final version represented the latter as voiced for the ease of the mostly-English-speaking singers who would be encountering this score). This week I spent some time glancing through some of the relevant literature on the topic, and everything I've seen suggests that this has been treated as a voicing alternation. I've also been listening very closely to my data, and I'm still convinced that, with the possible exception of intervocalic voicing, it's actually an alternation of aspiration.
I think the next step is to run the files through praat and actually measure voice onset time, but this brings up something I've been thinking about lately with respect to field work and phonology, and how important it is to make careful transcriptions and audio recordings.
Operating under the assumption that I'm correct (which may or may not be a valid assumption), it seems like this is a case where a native speaker of a language that didn't distinguish aspiration from voicing made the transcriptions, and wrote down what they heard. Phonologists ever since have been trusting that transcription, which may or may not be accurate. Fortunately there are still native speakers of Mohawk; and with sufficient time, resources, and permission I could collect new data to analyze. This is not true of, for example, Klamath. While there may be a few relatively proficient speakers left, there are no longer any native speakers. Phonologists must rely exclusively on transcriptions done by M.A.R. Barker (the audio recordings are degrading rapidly and can no longer be played reliably) --- said transcriptions are highly detailed and probably very accurate, but if he missed a relevant detail or distinction (such as only recording stress on a handful of examples) there's really nothing we can do about it.
Of course, it wouldn't be practical for a phonologist to collect fresh data every time there's an interesting question to investigate. We have to rely on the results of fieldwork, and we have to trust that transcriptions are accurate. We also need to remember that sometimes transcriptions aren't accurate, and that sometimes finding something entirely unexpected (such as a language that appears to prohibit voiceless onsets) means we should take another look at the data.
posted by Wendell Kimper at 7:38 AM
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