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Iroquoian

Iroquoian

The Iroquoian languages are a Native American language family. The family includes the languages of the Iroquois Confederacy (including the extinct Mingo language), as well as Cherokee. Every language in this family has at least one nasal vowel phoneme. Cherokee's is a nasal schwa, written in transliteration as 'v' (e.g. "Hv?" sounds like "Huh?" nasalized, and means the same thing).

Family division

The Iroquoian family is composed of eleven languages. I. Northern Iroquoian : A. Tuscarora-Nottoway :: 1. Tuscarora :: 2. Nottoway : B. Proto-Lake Iroquoian :: 3. Huron-Wyandot ::: dialects: :::
- Huron :::
- Wyandot :: 4. Laurentian (languages or dialects) (?) :: i. Iroquois Proper (a.k.a. Five Nations Iroquois) ::: 5. Onondaga ::: 6. Susquehannock (a.k.a. Andaste, Conestoga, Andastoerrhonon, Minqua) ::: a. Seneca-Cayuga :::: 7. Seneca :::: 8. Cayuga ::: b. Mohawk-Oneida :::: 9. Mohawk :::: 10. Oneida II. Southern Iroquoian : 11. Cherokee What has been called the Laurentian language appears to be actually more than one dialect or language. Many different groups making up the Wyandot and the Neutral have very little linguistic documentation. Among these are the Tionontati (a.k.a. Khionontateronon, Petun, Tobacco Nation), the Wenro, and the Erie (a.k.a. Nation du Chat). These groups were called Atiwandaronk meaning "they who understand the language" by the Huron, and thus are grouped as a dialect related to Huron. The Meherrin peoples may have spoken an Iroquoian language, but there is not enough data to determine this with certainty. Nottoway, Huron-Wyandot, Susquehannock, and the Laurentian languages/dialects are now all extinct. The last speakers of Susquehannock were all murdered by the Paxton Boys lynch mob.

Genetic relations

Some linguists group the Iroquoian languages with the Siouan languages as the Macro-Siouan family, but this larger family is not recognized by a consensus of linguists. For information regarding Proto-Iroquoian see Floyd Lounsbury's article on pages 334-343 in Volume 15 of the Handbook of North American Indians and Marianne Mithun's article on pages 259-282 of the Extending the Rafters: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Iroquois collection edited by Jack Campisi, Michael Foster, and Mithun. An article that is a bit more technical but also good is Blair Rudes' treatment of Proto-Iroquoian vowels in the Spring 1996 edition of Anthropological Linguistics.

Culture

The Iroquois were made up of a group or league of tribes that settled much of the land which presently spans from western New York to western Ohio. They were not nomadic but preferred to live in villages of many multi-roomed longhouses, built with saplings and bark or thatch. These longhouses could be up to 300 feet long. Villages were occupied for about 25-50 years. The Iroquois relied greatly on domestication of plant foods, but also supplemented their diet with hunting and gathering. Food such as corn, squash, beans, and other crops were cultivated, often on large fields where forest had been cut and burned for planting. It can be stated that they practiced a system of shifting horticulture. They spent much time on cultivation, harvesting, the preparatration of maize, and storing food. They stored their crops in various types of pottery jars. Pots were specialized by being much sturdier, constructed to withstand thermal stress, but were sensitive to mechanical stress. Iroquian pottery could also be used for a variety of reasons or uses. They were great for preparing maize. Excavated grains, pottery and other evidence suggests that a typical Indian meal consisted of soup made from different plants and animals, with corn as a staple in their diets.

Bibliography

- Goddard, Ives (Ed.). (1996). Languages. Handbook of North American Indians (W. C. Sturtevant, General Ed.) (Vol. 17). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 0-1604-8774-9.
- Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
- Chilton, Elizabeth. “Farming and Social Complexity in the Northeast.” North American Archaeology. Ed. Timothy R. Pauketat and Diana Dipaolo Loren. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005. 138-160.
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Language family

Most languages are known to belong to language families. An accurately identified family is a phylogenetic unit; that is, all its members derive from a common ancestor. This ancestor is very seldom known to us directly, since most languages have a very short recorded history. However, it is possible to recover many of its features by applying the comparative method — a reconstructive procedure worked out by 19th-century linguist August Schleicher. This can demonstrate the validity of many of the proposed families listed below. Language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family, because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram. However, the term family is not restricted to any one level of this "tree"; the Germanic family, for example, is a branch of the Indo-European family. Some taxonomists do restrict the term family to a certain level, but there is little consensus in how to do this. Those who do affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups, and groups into complexes. They also aggregate families into phyla (also known as stocks, or superfamilies). Phyla are often used to aggregate American Indian language families. One method for doing all of this is called glottochronology. The common ancestor of a family is known as its protolanguage. For example, the reconstructible protolanguage of the well-known Indo-European family is called Proto-Indo-European. This is not known from written records, since it was spoken before the invention of writing, but sometimes a protolanguage can be identified with a historically known language. Thus, provincial dialects of Latin ("Vulgar Latin") gave rise to the modern Romance languages, so the Proto-Romance language is more or less identical with Latin (if not exactly with the literary Latin of the Classical writers), and dialects of Old Norse are the protolanguage to Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Faroese and Icelandic. Languages that cannot be reliably classified into any family are known as language isolates. A language isolated in its own branch within a family, such as Greek within Indo-European, is often also called an isolate, but such cases are usually clarified. For instance, Greek might be referred to as an Indo-European isolate.

Largest families

According to the numbers in Ethnologue[http://www.ethnologue.com/web.asp], the largest language families in terms of number of languages are: # Niger-Congo (1514 languages) # Austronesian (1268 languages) # Trans-New Guinea (564 languages) (validity disputed) # Indo-European (449 languages) # Sino-Tibetan (403 languages) # Afro-Asiatic (375 languages) # Nilo-Saharan (204 languages) # Pama-Nyungan (178 languages) # Oto-Manguean (174 languages) (number disputed; Lyle Campbell includes only 27) # Austro-Asiatic (169 languages) # Sepik-Ramu (100 languages) (validity disputed) # Tai-Kadai (76 languages) # Tupi (76 languages) # Dravidian (73 languages) # Mayan (69 languages)

Language families (spoken)

In the following, each "bulleted" item is a known language family. The geographic headings over them are meant solely as a tool for grouping families into collections more comprehensible than an unstructured list of the dozen or two of independent families. Geographic relationship is convenient for that purpose, but these headings are not a suggestion of any "super-families" phylogenetically relating the families named.

Central America and South America

Language isolates (spoken)

Central & South America

# Aikaná (Brazil: Rondônia) # Alagüilac (Guatemala) # Andoque (Colombia, Peru) # Baenan (Brazil) # Betoi (Columbia) # Camsá (Columbia) # Canichana (Bolivia) # Cayubaba language (Bolivia) # Coahuilteco (US: Texas; northeast Mexico) # Cofán (Colombia, Ecuador) # Cotoname (northeast Mexico; US: Texas) # Cuitlatec (Mexico: Guerrero) # Culle (Peru) # Cunza (Chile, Bolivia, Argentina) # Gamela (Brazil: Maranhão) # Gorgotoqui (Bolivia) # Huamoé (Brazil: Pernambuco) # Huave (Mexico: Oaxaca) # Irantxe (Brazil: Mato Grosso) # Itonama (Bolivia) # Jotí (Venezuela) # Karirí (Brazil: Paraíba, Pernambuco, Ceará) # Koayá (Brazil: Rondônia) # Kukurá (Brazil: Mato Grosso) # Mapudungu (Chile, Argentina) # Maratino (northeastern Mexico) # Movima (Bolivia) # Munichi (Peru) # Nambiquaran (Brazil: Mato Grosso) # Naolan (Mexico: Tamaulipas) # Natú (Brazil: Pernambuco) # Omurano (Peru) # Otí (Brazil: São Paulo) # Pankararú (Brazil: Pernambuco) # Puelche (Chile) # Puinave (Columbia) # Puquina (Bolivia) # Quinigua (northeast Mexico) # Sabela (Ecuador, Peru) # Seri (Mexico: Sonora) # Solano (northeast Mexico; US: Texas) # Tarairiú (Brazil: Rio Grande do Norte) # Tarascan (a.k.a. Purépecha) (Mexico: Michoacán) # Taushiro (Peru) # Tequiraca (Peru) # Ticuna (Colombia, Peru, Brazil) # Tuxá (Brazil: Bahia, Pernambuco) # Warao (Guyana, Surinam, Venezuela) # Xokó (Brazil: Alagoas, Pernambuco) # Xukurú (Brazil: Pernambuco, Paraíba) # Yámana (a.k.a Yagan) (Chile) # Yuracare (Bolivia) # Yuri (Colombia, Brazil) # Yurumanguí (Columbia)
North America
# Adai (US: Louisiana, Texas) # Aranama-Tamique (US: Texas) # (US: Louisiana, Texas) # Beothuk (Canada: Newfoundland) # Calusa (US: Florida) # Cayuse (US: Oregon, Washington) # Chimariko (US: California) # Chitimacha (US: Lousiania) # Coahuilteco (US: Texas; northeast Mexico) # Cotoname (northeast Mexico; US: Texas) # Esselen (US: California) # Haida (Canada: British Columbia; US: Alaska) # Karankawa (US: Texas) # Karok (a.k.a. Karuk) (US: California) # Keres (US: New Mexico) # Konomihu (US: California) # Kootenai (Canada: British Columbia; US: Idaho, Montana) # Natchez (US: Mississippi, Louisiana) # Salinan (US: California) # Siuslaw (US: Oregon) # Solano (northeast Mexico; US: Texas) # Takelma (US: Oregon) # Timucua (US: Florida, Georgia) # Tonkawa (US: Texas) # Tunica (US: Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas) # Washo (US: California, Nevada) # Yana (US: California) # Yuchi (US: Georgia, Oklahoma) # Zuni (a.k.a. Shiwi) (US: New Mexico)
Asia
# Ainu language or languages (Russia, Japan) (like Arabic or Japanese, the diversity within Ainu is large enough that some consider it to be perhaps up to a dozen languages while others consider it a single language with high dialectal diversity) # Burushaski (Pakistan, India) (sometimes linked to Yeniseian) # Kalto or Nahali (India) [sometimes linked to Munda] # Korean (North & South Korea, China, USA) (sometimes linked to Altaic) # Nivkh or Gilyak (Russia) (sometimes linked to Chukchi-Kamchatkan) # Sumerian (Iraq) [extinct] # Elamite (Iran) [extinct] (sometimes linked to Dravidian) # Hattic (Turkiye) [extinct] (sometimes linked to Northwest Caucasian)
Africa
# Hadza (Tanzania) (sometimes included in Khoisan)
Europe
# Basque (Spain, France) # Etruscan (Italy) [extinct] # Iberian (Spain) [extinct] # Pictish (Scotland) [extinct] [disputed - possibly an Indo European Celtic - Brythonic language]
Sign languages
:See also List of sign languages. There has been very little historical linguistic research on sign languages, and few attempts to determine genetic relationships between sign languages, other than simple comparison of lexical data and some discussion about whether certain sign languages are dialects of a language or languages of a family. Auslan, NZSL and BSL are usually considered to belong to a language family known as BANZSL, and Japanese Sign Language, Taiwanese Sign Language and Korean Sign Language are thought to be members of a Japanese Sign Language family. There are a number of sign languages with strong links to French Sign Language, including Quebec Sign Language, American Sign Language, Irish Sign Language, Dutch Sign Language, Flemish Sign Language, and Belgian-French Sign Language. Bolivian Sign Language is sometimes considered a dialect of American Sign Language. Other languages, such as Nicaraguan Sign Language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, and Providence Island Sign Language are known to be isolates.
Creole languages, pidgins, mixed languages, and trade languages

- American Indian Pidgin English
- Basque-Algonquian Pidgin (a.k.a. Micmac-Basque Pidgin, Souriquois)
- Bislamic languages
- Australian Creole (a.k.a. Kriol)
- Bislama
- Pijin
- Tok Pisin
- Torres Strait Creole (a.k.a. Broken, Cape York Creole, Lockhart Creole)
- Broken Oghibbeway (a.k.a. Broken Ojibwa)
- Broken Slavey (a.k.a. Slavey Jargon, Broken Slavé)
- Callahuaya (a.k.a. Machaj-Juyai, Kallawaya)
- Carib Pidgin (a.k.a. Ndjuka-Amerindian Pidgin, Ndjuka-Trio)
- Carib Pidgin-Arawak Mixed Language
- Catalangu
- Chabacano - A Spanish creole spoken in South of the Philippines.
- Chinook Jargon
- Delaware Jargon (a.k.a. Pidgin Delaware)
- Eskimo Trade Jargon (a.k.a. Herschel Island Eskimo Pidgin, Ship's Jargon)
- Greenlandic Eskimo Pidgin
- Guajiro-Spanish
- Güegüence-Nicarao
- Haida Jargon
- Haitian creole
- Hawaiian Creole English
- Hiri Motu
- Hudson Strait Pidgin
- International Sign or Gestuno - constructed language
- Inuktitut-English Pidgin
- Jargonized Powhatan
- Kutenai Jargon
- Labrador Eskimo Pidgin (a.k.a. Labrador Inuit Pidgin)
- Lingua Franca Apalachee
- Lingua Franca Creek
- Lingua franca
- Lingua Geral do Sul (a.k.a. Lingua Geral Paulista, Tupí Austral)
- Loucheux Jargon (a.k.a. Jargon Loucheux)
- Media Lengua
- Mednyj Aleut (a.k.a. Copper Island Aleut, Medniy Aleut, CIA)
- Michif (a.k.a. French Cree, Métis, Metchif, Mitchif, Métchif)
- Mobilian Jargon (a.k.a. Mobilian Trade Jargon, Chickasaw-Chocaw Trade Language, Yamá
- Montagnais Pidgin Basque (a.k.a. Pidgin Basque-Montagnais)
- Nheengatú (a.k.a. Lingua Geral Amazônica, Lingua Boa, Lingua Brasílica, Lingua Geral do Norte)
- Norfuk
- Nootka Jargon
- Ocaneechi
- Pitkern
- Pidgin Massachusett
- Portuguese Creole languages
- Rusnorsk
- Sango
Proposed language stocks

Other natural languages of special interest

- Endangered languages
- Extinct languages
- Constructed languages
External links

- http://www.ethnologue.com/web.asp
- http://gebaren.ugent.be
- http://www.elanguages.info - articles, products, & info about language learning online
- [http://www.nicemice.net/amc/tmp/lang-pop.var Number of speakers by language]
Bibliography

- Boas, Franz. (1911). Handbook of American Indian languages (Vol. 1). Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40. Washington: Government Print Office (Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology).
- Boas, Franz. (1922). Handbook of American Indian languages (Vol. 2). Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40. Washington: Government Print Office (Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology).
- Boas, Franz. (1933). Handbook of American Indian languages (Vol. 3). Native American legal materials collection, title 1227. Glückstadt: J.J. Augustin.
- Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.
- Campbell, Lyle; & Mithun, Marianne (Eds.). (1979). The languages of native America: Historical and comparative assessment. Austin: University of Texas Press.
- Goddard, Ives (Ed.). (1996). Languages. Handbook of North American Indians (W. C. Sturtevant, General Ed.) (Vol. 17). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 0-1604-8774-9.
- Goddard, Ives. (1999). Native languages and language families of North America (rev. and enlarged ed. with additions and corrections). [Map]. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press (Smithsonian Institute). (Updated version of the map in Goddard 1996). ISBN 0-8032-9271-6.
- Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (Ed.). (2005). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (15th ed.). Dallas, TX: SIL International. ISBN 1-55671-159-X. (Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com).
- Greenberg, Joseph H. (1966). The Languages of Africa (2nd ed.). Bloomington: Indiana University.
- Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
- Ruhlen, Merritt. (1987). A guide to the world's languages. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- Sturtevant, William C. (Ed.). (1978-present). Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 1-20). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. (Vols. 1-3, 16, 18-20 not yet published).
- Voegelin, C. F.; & Voegelin, F. M. (1977). Classification and index of the world's languages. New York: Elsevier.
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- ja:言語の分類一覧 ko:어족 simple:Language families and languages th:ตระกูลของภาษา

Mingo (tribe)

Tribal Name

Mingo is thought to be a corruption of mingwe, which is an Algonquian word meaning "stealthy" or "treacherous." English colonists used the term to describe the Iroquois bands that had migrated to western Pennsylvania and Virginia by 1740.

Background

The Mingo people are an Iroquois group that migrated west to the Ohio River Valley in present-day West Virginia in the mid-eighteenth century where they formed their own distinct identity. Their villages were increasingly an amalgamation of Seneca, Wyandot, Shawnee, Susquehannock, and Delaware evacuees. By 1774, the Mingos acted independently of the Iroquois, frequently fighting white settlers while the Six Nations officially advocated peace. Their presence in central and eastern Ohio throughout the 1760s and 1780s especially conflicted with hordes of white settlers who vied with them for control of the region. The Mingos were led by Chief Logan in a series of battles. Despite some pockets of resistance, the Mingos were crushed, and the surviving members of the group mixed with the larger Shawnee and Miami peoples. By 1830, the Mingos were flourishing in western Ohio improving their farms and establishing schools. Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of that same year, however, forced the Mingos and all natives in Ohio to sell their lands and leave. The United States finally defeated the Mingo nation in 1831 and subsequently forced them to vacate to Kansas in 1832. Upon their removal to Kansas, the Mingos were joined by Seneca bands and both tribes shared the Neosho Reservation there. The tribe moved yet again in 1869 after the American Civil War from the reservation to the southern part of the Neosho tract in present-day Ottawa County, Oklahoma. Today, the tribe numbers over twenty-four hundred members and continues to maintain cultural and religious ties to the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.

Language

The Mingo language (native name: Unyææshæötká') is a Northern Iroquoian language of eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. It is a polysynthetic language with extremely complex verb usage, closely related to Seneca, Onondaga and Cayuga. There has been increasing interest in recent years, especially among Mingo descendants, in revitalizing the language. Today, in southern West Virginia exists Mingo County, named for the Mingo tribe.

External links

- [http://mingolanguage.org/ West Virginia Mingo Alphabet & Dictionary] Category:Iroquois

Nasal consonant

A nasal stop is produced when the velum—that fleshy part of the palate near the back—is lowered, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound, but the air does not escape through the mouth as it is blocked by the tongue. Thus, it is not the nose itself that differentiates between the nasal stops, but rather the tongue's articulation, as in oral stops (plosives). Rarely, other types of consonant may be nasalized. Acoustically, nasal stops are sonorants, meaning they do not restrict the escape of air and cross-linguistically are nearly always voiced. (Compare oral plosives, which block off the air completely, and fricatives, which obstruct the air with a narrow channel. Both stops and fricatives are more commonly voiceless than voiced, and are known as obstruents.) However, nasals are also stops in their articulaton because the flow of air through the mouth is blocked completely. This duality, a sonorant airflow through the nose along with an obstruction in the mouth, means that nasal stops behave both like sonorants and like obstruents. For the purposes of acoustic description they are generally considered sonorants, but in many languages they may develop from or into plosives. Acoustically, nasal stops have bands of energy at around 200 and 2,000 Hz. List of nasal stops:
- is a voiced bilabial nasal
- is a voiced labiodental nasal (SAMPA: [F])
- is an alveolar or dental nasal: see alveolar nasal
- voiced retroflex nasal, common in Indic languages (SAMPA: [n`])
- voiced palatal nasal (SAMPA: [J]); is a common sound in European languages as in: Spanish ñ; or French and Italian gn; or Catalan and Hungarian ny; or Portuguese nh.
- voiced velar nasal (SAMPA: [N]), as in sing.
- voiced uvular nasal (SAMPA: [N\]) Examples of languages containing nasal stops: English, German and Cantonese have , and Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian have , , as phonemes, and and as allophones. (In several American dialects of Spanish, there is no palatal nasal, but only a palatalized nasal, , as in English canyon.) The term 'nasal stop' will often be abbreviated to just "nasal". However, there are also nasal vowels, as in French, Portuguese, Yoruba, Gbe, Polish, and Ljubljana Slovene. In the IPA, nasal vowels are indicated by placing a tilde (~) over the vowel in question: French sang . Very few languages contain no nasal consonants. This has led Ferguson (1963) to assume that all languages have at least one primary nasal consonant. When a language is claimed to lack nasal consonants altogether, as with several Niger-Congo languages, or the Pirahã language of the Amazon, nasal and non-nasal consonants usually alternate allophonically, and it is a theoretical claim on the part of the individual linguist that the nasal version is not the basic form of the consonant. In the case of some Niger-Congo languages, for example, nasal consonants only occur before nasal vowels. Since nasal vowels are phonemic, it simplifies the picture somewhat to assume that nasalization in stops is allophonic. There is then a second step in claiming that nasal vowels nasalize the stops, rather than oral vowels denasalizing them. Postulating nasal vowels instead of nasal consonants helps to explain the apparent instability of nasal correspondences throughout Niger-Congo compared with, for example, Indo-European. However, several of the Chimakuan, Salish, and Wakashan languages surrounding Puget Sound, such as Quileute, Lushootseed, and Makah, are truly without any nasalization at all, in consonants or vowels, except in special speech registers such as baby-talk or the archaic speech of mythological figures (and perhaps not even that in the case of Quileute). This is an areal feature, only a few hundred years old, where nasal stops became voiced plosives ([m] became [b], etc). The only other place in the world where this occurs is in a dialect of the Rotokas language of Papua New Guinea, where nasal stops are only used when imitating foreign accents. (A second dialect does have nasal stops.)

Notes and references

Notes

# As noted by Williamson (1989:24).

References

- Ferguson (1963) 'Assumptions about nasals', in Greenberg (ed.) Universals of Language, pp 50-60.
- Saout, J. le (1973) 'Languages sans consonnes nasales', Annales de l Université d'Abidjan, H, 6, 1, 179-205.
- Williamson, Kay (1989) 'Niger-Congo overview', in Bendor-Samuel & Hartell (eds.) The Niger-Congo Languages, 3-45. Category:Consonants ko:비음 ja:鼻音

Phoneme

In human language, a phoneme is a set of phones (speech sounds or sign elements) that are cognitively equivalent. It is the basic unit that distinguishes words and morphemes. That is, changing an element of a word from one phoneme to another produces either a different word or obvious nonsense; whereas changing an element from one phone to another, when both belong to the same phoneme, produces the same word with an odd or incomprehensible pronunciation. Phonemes are not the physical segments themselves, but mental abstractions of them. A phoneme is a family of phones, called allophones, that the speakers of a language think of, and hear or see, as being the same. In sign languages, the phoneme was formerly called a chereme (or cheireme), but usage changed to phoneme when it was recognized that the mental abstractions involved are essentially the same as in oral languages. A "perfect" alphabet is one that has a single symbol for each phoneme. Phonemics, a branch of phonology, is the study of the systems of phonemes of languages. Although it is fundamental to most phonological theories, some linguists reject the theoretical validity of the phoneme. Some think that phonemes are more a product of literacy (i.e., the need to categorize the phonetics of a language in order to write it down systematically with a minimum number of letters). Other critics charge that the mind processes sub-phonemic elements of speech (e.g., features) in meaningful ways. A common test to determine whether two phones are allophones or separate phonemes relies on finding so-called minimal pairs: words that differ only in the phones in question.

Background and related ideas

The term phonème was reportedly first used by Dufriche-Desgenettes in 1873, but it refered to only a sound of speech. The term phoneme as an abstraction was developed by the Polish linguist Jan Niecislaw Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Mikołaj Kruszewski during 1875-1895. The term used by these two was fonema, the basic unit of what they called psychophonetics. The concept of the phoneme was elaborated in the works of Nikolai Trubetzkoi and other of the Prague School (during the years 1926-1935), as well as in that of structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure, Edward Sapir, and Leonard Bloomfield. Later, it was also used in generative linguistics, most famously by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, and remains central in any accounts of the development of virtually all modern schools of phonology. The phoneme can be defined as "the smallest meaningful psychological unit of sound." The phoneme has mental, physiological, and physical substance: our brains process the sounds; the sounds are produced by the human speech organs; and the sounds are physical entities that can be recorded and measured. For an example of phonemes, consider the English words pat and sat, which differ only in their initial consonants. This difference, known as contrastiveness or opposition, is sufficient to distinguish these words, and therefore the P and S sounds are said to be different phonemes. A pair of words that are identical except for such a sound are known as a minimal pair; this is the most frequent demonstration that two sounds are separate phonemes. If no minimal pair can be found to demonstrate that two sounds are distinct, it may be that they are allophones. Allophones are variant phones (i.e., sounds) that are not recognized as distinct by a speaker, and are not meaningfully different in the language, and yet are perceived as "the same". This is especially likely if they consistently occur in different environments. For example, the "dark" L sound at the end of the English word "wool" is quite different from the "light" L sound at the beginning of the word "leaf", but this difference is meaningless in English, and is determined by whether the sound is at the beginning or end of a word. A native English speaker might have a hard time hearing the difference at first, but in Turkish the difference between "light" and "dark" L is sufficient to distinguish words. That is, they are two separate phonemes in Turkish, but allophones of a single phoneme in English. The phonemic relationship of two sounds may not be obvious to a non-native speaker, which is why minimal pairs and an understanding of phonetic environments are important. For example, in Korean, there is a phoneme /r/ that is a flapped r between vowels, and is an l-sound next to other consonants. These sound very different to an English speaker, who is attuned to hearing them because the differences are meaningful in English. However, the native speaker has learned from an early age to filter out the difference, as they are not meaningful in their language. In Korean, for instance, it is impossible to distinguish the two words "ram" and "lam", despite the fact that both R and L sounds occur in the language. The exact number of phonemes in English depends on the speaker and the method of determining phoneme vs. allophone, but estimates typically range from 40 to 45, which is above average across all languages. Pirahã has only 10, while !Xóõ has 141. Depending on the language and the alphabet used, a phoneme may be written consistently with one letter; however there are many exceptions to this rule — see Writing systems below. Some languages make use of pitch for the precise same purpose. In this case, the tones used are called tonemes. Some languages distinguish words made up of the same phonemes (and tonemes) by using different durations of some elements, which are called chronemes. However, the chroneme is not employed by the majority of scholars working on languages with distinctive duration, and the term itself may not even be recognized by most linguists. Usually, long vowels and consonants are represented either by a length indicator or doubling of the sound in question. In sign languages, phonemes may be classified as Tab (elements of location, from Latin tabula), Dez (the hand shape, from designator), Sig (the motion, from signation), and with some researchers, Ori (orientation). Facial expressions and mouthing are also phonemic.

Notation

A transcription that only indicates the different phonemes of a languages is said to be phonemic. Such transcriptions are enclosed within virgules (slashes), / /; these show that each enclosed symbol is claimed to be phonemically meaningful. On the other hand, a transcription that indicates finer detail, including allophonic variation like the two English L's, is said to be phonetic, and is enclosed in square brackets, [ ]. The common notation used in linguistics employs virgules (slashes) (/ /) around the symbol that stands for the phoneme. For example, the phoneme for the initial consonant sound in the word "phoneme" would be written as . In other words, the graphemes are <ph>, but this digraph represents one sound . Allophones, real speech variants of a phoneme, are often denoted in linguistics by the use of diacritical or other marks added to the phoneme symbols and then placed in square brackets ([ ]) to differentiate them from the phoneme in slant brackets (/ /). The conventions of orthography are then kept separate from both phonemes and allophones by the use of the markers < > to enclose the spelling. The symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and extended sets adapted to a particular language are often used by linguists to write phonemes of oral languages, with the principle being one symbol equals one categorical sound. Due to problems displaying some symbols in the early days of the Internet, systems such as X-SAMPA and Kirshenbaum were developed to represent IPA symbols in plain text. As of 2004, any modern web browser can display IPA symbols (as long as the operating system provides the appropriate fonts), and we use this system in this article. The only published set of phonemic symbols for a sign language is the Stokoe notation developed for American Sign Language, which has since been applied to British Sign Language by Kyle and Woll, and to Australian Aboriginal sign languages by Adam Kendon. However, there are several phonetic systems, such as SignWriting.

Examples

Examples of phonemes in the English language would include sounds from the set of English consonants, like and . These two are most often written consistently with one letter for each sound. However, phonemes might not be so apparent in written English, such as when they are typically represented with combined letters, called digraphs, like <sh> (pronounced ) or <ch> (pronounced ). To see a list of the phonemes in the English language, see IPA for English. Two sounds that may be allophones (sound variants belonging to the same phoneme) in one language may belong to separate phonemes in another language or dialect. In English, for example, has aspirated and non-aspirated allophones:aspirated as in , and non-aspirated as in . However, in many languages (e. g. Chinese), aspirated is a phoneme distinct from unaspirated . As another example, there is no distinction between and in Japanese, there is only one phoneme in Japanese, although the Japanese has allophones that make it sound more like an , , or to English speakers. The sounds and are distinct phonemes in English, but allophones in Spanish. (as in run) and (as in rung) are phonemes in English, but allophones in Italian and Spanish. An important phoneme is the chroneme, a phonemically-relevant extension of the duration a consonant or vowel. Some languages or dialects such as Finnish or Japanese allow chronemes after both consonants and vowels. Others, like Italian or Australian English use it after only one (in the case of Italian, consonants; in the case of Australian, vowels).

Arguments against the phoneme

Rather than a basic mental unit of language, some think that the phoneme may well be a perceptual artifact of alphabetic literacy (see the terms Phonemic awareness and Phonological awareness). If not that, it may be an epiphenomenal aspect to listening removed from face-to-face encounters, that is, text-like listening (qv phone and feature). It could be said that the unit of the phoneme is a necessary construct if we wish to set a dynamic, complex spoken language into static, written form expressed at a sub-syllabic level, though the model is a simplification and no where near phonologically or phonetically complete. The phoneme has the theoretical weakness from the perspective of phonology in that it uses, in part, lexical criteria to determine something that is supposed to be phonological (i.e., minimal pairs of words to point out phonological categories). Much of phonology, while accepting the phoneme as possible model or unit of language for description, has largely moved past the segmental phoneme as a basic unit of speech, of speech processing or of language acquisition. This is because the concept of the 'feature' is viewed as beneath the level of the phoneme while also spanning across segments. Meanwhile, attempts at capturing a phonological picture of the psychological control and structure underlying real speech flounder on the inadequacies of the phoneme for such purposes (that is, the phoneme can not account for co-articulation or assimilation of controlled speech, among other phenomena). However, the term, though variably defined and delimited, remains a widely and uncritically accepted concept in foreign language teaching and native literacy (especially for alphabetic languages, such as English).

Restricted phonemes

A restricted phoneme is a phoneme that can only occur in a certain environment: There are restrictions as to where it can occur. English has several restricted phonemes:
- , as in sing, occurs only at the end of a syllable, never at the beginning. (In many other languages, such as Swahili, can start a word.)
- occurs only at the beginning of a syllable, never at the end. (A few languages such as Arabic allow /h/ at the ends of words.)
- In many American dialects with the cot-caught merger, occurs only before /r/, /l/, and in the diphthong .
- In non-rhotic dialects, /r/ can only occur before a vowel, never at the end of a word or before a consonant.
- Under most interpretations, and occur only before a vowel, never at the end of a syllable. However, many phonologists interpret a word like boy as either or .

Neutralization, archiphoneme, underspecification

Phonemes that are contrastive in certain environments may not be contrastive in all environments. In the environments where they don't contrast, the contrast is said to be neutralized. In English there are three nasal phonemes, , as shown by the minimal triplet, However, these sounds are not contrastive before plosives such as . Although all three phones appear before plosives, for example in limp, lint, link, only one of these may appear before each of the plosives. That is, the distinction is neutralized before each of the plosives :
- Only occurs before ,
- only before , and
- only before . Thus these phonemes are not contrastive in these environments, and according to some theorists, there is no evidence as to what the underlying representation might be. If we hypothesize that we are dealing with only a single underlying nasal, there is no reason to pick one of the three phonemes over the other two. (In some languages there is only one phonemic nasal anywhere, and due to obligatory assimilation, it surfaces as in just these environments, so this idea is not as far-fetched as it might seem at first glance.) In certain schools of phonology, such a neutralized distinction is known as an archiphoneme (Nikolai Trubetzkoy of the Prague school is often associated with this analysis.). Archiphonemes are often notated with a capital letter. Following this convention, the neutralization of before could be notated as |N|, and limp, lint, link would be represented as |lɪNp, lɪNt, lɪNk|. (The |pipes| indicate underlying representation.) Other ways this archiphoneme could be notated are |m-n-ŋ|, , or |n
- |. Another example from English is the neutralization of the plosives /k, g/ following /s/. Phonetically, the unaspirated tenuis plosive in sky is closer to English /g/, which is partially voiceless in initial position, than to aspirated /k/. This can be heard by comparing the sky with this guy; also, in the speech of young children who are not yet able to produce consonant clusters, they often pronounce sky as what sounds like to adult ears. That is, /k/ and /g/ are constrastive word initially, But not after an /s/, Thus one cannot say whether the underlying representation of the plosive in sky is /skai/ without aspiration, or /sgai/ without voicing. This neutralization can instead be represented as an archiphoneme |G|, in which case the underlying representation of sky would be |sGai|. Another way to talk about archiphonemes involves the concept of underspecification. Phonemes can be considered fully specified segments while archiphonemes are underspecified segments. In Tuvan, phonemic vowels are specified with the features of tongue height, backness, and lip rounding. The archiphoneme |U| is an underspecified high vowel where only the tongue height is specified. Whether |U| is pronounced as front or back and whether rounded or unrounded depends on vowel harmony. If |U| occurs following a front unrounded vowel, it will be pronounced as the phoneme ; if following a back unrounded vowel, it will be as an ; and if following a back rounded vowel, it will be an . This can been seen in the following words: It should be noted that not all phonologists accept the concept of archiphonemes. Many doubt that it reflects how people process language.

Non-phonemes

Prothesis, epenthesis and paragoge due to phonotactics add sounds into words without adding meaning. Nevertheless, the sound is added, and thus the phoneme status may be ambiguous. For example, Spanish prothetic e- must be added before consonant clusters, e.g. estres.

Phonological extremes

Of all the sounds that a human vocal tract can create, different languages vary considerably in the number of these sounds that are considered to be distinctive phonemes in the speech of that language. Ubyx and some dialects of Abkhaz have only two phonemic vowels, and many Native American languages have three. On other extreme, the Bantu language Ngwe has fourteen vowel qualities, twelve of which may occur long or short, for twenty-six oral vowels, plus six nasalized vowels, long and short, for thirty-eight vowels; while !Xóõ achieves thirty-one pure vowels—not counting vowel length, which it also has—by varying the phonation. Rotokas has only six consonants, while !Xóõ has somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy-seven, and Ubyx eighty-one. French has no phonemic tone or stress, while several of the Kam-Sui languages have nine tones, and one of the Kru languages, Wobe, has been claimed to have fourteen, though this is disputed. The total number of phonemes in languages varies from as few as eleven in Rotokas to as many as 112 in !Xóõ (including four tones). These may range from familiar sounds like , , or to very unusual ones produced in extraordinary ways (see: Click consonant, phonation, airstream mechanism). The English language itself uses a rather large set of thirteen to twenty-two vowels, including diphthongs, though its twenty-two to twenty-six consonants are close to average. (There are twenty-one consonant and five vowel letters in the English alphabet, but this does not correspond to the number of consonant and vowel sounds.) The most common vowel system consists of the five vowels . The most common consonants are . A very few languages lack one of these: standard Hawai‘ian lacks , Mohawk lacks and , Hupa lacks both and a simple , colloquial Samoan lacks and , while Rotokas and Quileute lack and . While most of these languages have very small inventories, Quileute and Hupa have quite complex consonant systems. The ways that sounds are pronounced can vary slightly from language to language even if the same IPA symbol is used. For example, the Finnish word maat ("countries") sounds different from the British English (Received Pronunciation) word mart even though both are transcribed as IPA [http://www.helsinki.fi/hum/hyfl/projektit/vokaalikartat_eng.html#sweswedish_vowels]; the Spanish word sin ("without") has a somewhat different vowel from the American English seen though both are transcribed as .

Writing systems

In a phonemic writing system, a given symbol represents a single phoneme and each phoneme is represented by a single symbol. This may differ from a phonetic orthography, which only requires that the spelling be unambiguously determined by the pronunciation, and the pronunciation unambiguously indicated by the spelling. English spelling is the classic example of an nonphonemic, and indeed unphonetic, spelling system. Welsh and Irish are, by contrast, among the more predictable orthographies among languages using the Latin alphabet. In French, rules to predict pronunciation from spelling are quite simple and have few exceptions, as long as there are some clues such as context or part of speech, but guessing spelling from pronunciation is quite difficult, especially because of the many silent letters. Italian, Spanish and especially Finnish have a very close letter-to-phoneme correspondence. Karelian has a perfectly phonemic spelling system, as it has no standard language, but it has a complete spelling system. However, the split between phonemic and nonphonemic orthographies is exaggerated. All languages are written with conventions that represent both meaning and pronunciation. This is true at both ends of the scale: Chinese characters are first and foremost symbols of words, but they have some phonetic information as well. At the other extreme, there are a few orthographies which are perfect phonemic representations of an artificial national standard, but since they make no effort to represent variation in pronunciation within the language, they too are conventional. Other languages fall somewhere in between. Although English is often given as an example of an unphonetic orthography, its system is nowhere near to being as purely conventional a system as Chinese writing is. English spelling conveys etymological information, but also vast amounts of phonetic information. Spanish is often given as an example of a phonetic orthography, but it has numerous imperfections including silent letters. It is, at least, possible to tell the correct pronunciation of any written Spanish word. Another phonemic orthography is Serbian. Its phonemicity was established by Serbian "Webster" Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. He followed a strict phonemic principle, which is best told by his own words: "Write as you speak and read as it is written.". Hindi, a descendant of Sanskrit, is an example of phonetic language written with a non-Roman Alphabet.

External links

- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneme.htm What is a phoneme? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnAllophone.htm What is an allophone? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhone.htm What is a phone? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneticallySimilarSegm.htm What is a phonetically similar segment? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAMinimalPair.htm What is a minimal pair? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsComplementaryDistributio.htm What is complementary distribution? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnEnvironment.htm What is an environment? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsContrastInIdenticalEnvir.htm What is an contrast in identical environments? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsContrastInAnalogousEnvir.htm What is an contrast in analogous environments? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/ComparisonOfMorphemeMorphAllom.htm Comparison of morpheme-morph-allomorph & phoneme-phone-allophone? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Phonology.htm What is phonology? (SIL)]
- [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=phoneme Phoneme (Lexicon of Linguistics)]
- [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=allophony Allophony (Lexicon of Linguistics)]
- [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=transcription Transcription (Lexicon of Linguistics)]
- [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Grapheme-phoneme+conversion Grapheme-Phoneme Conversion (Lexicon of Linguistics)]
- [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Phoneme+restoration Phoneme Restoration (Lexicon of Linguistics)]
- [http://moodle.ed.uiuc.edu/wiked/index.php/Phonemic_awareness phonemic awareness] Category:Phonetics Category:Phonology zh-min-nan:Im-sò· ko:낱소리 ja:音素

Wyandot language

Wyandot is the Iroquoian language traditionally spoken by the people known variously as Wyandot, Wendat, or Huron. It was last spoken primarily in Oklahoma and Quebec. Wyandot no longer has any native speakers, but is being studied and promoted as a second language. Category:Iroquoian languages Category:Languages of Canada Category:Languages of the United States Category:Indigenous languages of the North American eastern woodlands

Five Nations

Five Nations can refer to:
- The original five nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, a union of Native American tribes
- The Five Nations Championship in rugby union, now the Six Nations Championship
- The Five Nations of the Eberron Campaign Setting.

Susquehannock

The Susquehannock people were natives of areas adjacent to the Susquehanna River and its tributaries from the southern part of what is now New York, through Pennsylvania, to the mouth of the Susquehanna in Maryland at the north end of the Chesapeake Bay. These people were called
- Andastes by the French (from their Huron name Andastoerrhonon),
- Minquas by the Dutch and Swedes (their Delaware name meaning "treacherous"),
- Susquehannocks by the English of Maryland and Virginia (an Algonquin name meaning "people of the muddy river", and
- Conestoga by the English of Pennsylvania (from Kanastoge, meaning place of the immersed pole, the name of their village in Pennsylvania). It is unknown what the Susquehannocks called themselves. The Susquehannocks were Iroquoian-speaking people who rejected invitations to join the Five Nations Iroquois League to the north. This made them a typical enemy of the Five Nations. The true nature of their society, whether comprised of a single tribe in a single village, or a confederacy of smaller tribes occupying scattered villages, will probably never be known, since Europeans seldom visited this inland region during the early colonial period. It's likely that the Susquehannocks had occupied the same land for several hundred years. They had a formidable village in the lower river valley near present-day Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when Captain John Smith of Jamestown met them in 1608. He estimated the population of their village to be two thousand, although he never visited it. Modern estimates of their population, including the whole territory in 1600, range as high as seven thousand.

External links

- [http://www.brokenclaw.net/native/susquehannock.html "Where are the Susquehannock?" from brokenclaw.net]
- [http://www.dickshovel.com/susque.html "Susquehannock History" by Lee Sultzman] Category:Extinct languages Category:Iroquoian languages Category:Languages of the United States Category:Native American tribes

Seneca language

Seneca (in Seneca, Onödowága or Onötowáka) is the language of the Seneca Native Band, one of the Six Nations of the Iroquois League. About 10,000 Seneca live in the United States and Canada, primarily on reservations in western New York state, with others living in Oklahoma and near Brantford, Ontario.

Phonology

Seneca has three stops, /t/, /k/, and . /t/ and /k/ are phonetically [d] and before vowels or approximants. There are two voiced affricates, and (spelled ), and three voiceless fricatives, /s/, /ʃ/ (spelled ), and /h/. There is one nasal /n/, and two approximants, /w/ and /j/. There are four oral vowels, /i/, /e/, /o/, and /a/, and three nasal vowels, , , and (spelled with diareses on top: <ë ö ä>). Long vowels are indicated with a following colon, <:>. The orthography described here is the one used by the Seneca Bilingual Education Project.

External links

- [http://www.languagegeek.com/rotinonhsonni/seneca.html Language Geek: Seneca]
- [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=see Ethnologue Report on Seneca] Category:Languages of Canada Category:Iroquoian languages Category:Languages of the United States Category:Indigenous languages of the North American eastern woodlands

Cayuga language

Cayuga (In Cayuga Goyogohó:nǫ’) is a Northern Iroquoian language of the Iroquois Proper (a.k.a. "Five Nations Iroquois") subfamily, and is spoken in Six Nations, Ontario by around 100 people.

Dialects

There were at one time two distinct dialects of Cayuga. One is still spoken in Ontario, the other, called "Seneca-Cayuga," was spoken in Oklahoma until the 1980s.

Sounds

Vowels

Cayuga has 12 vowels, six short and six long. [u] can appear as an allophone of /o/. Vowels can be devoiced allophonically, indicated in the orthography used at Six Nations by underlining them.

Consonants

Cayuga has only ten consonants, with no labials (/w/ is closer to a velar than a labial). In the Six Nations orthography, the stops and affricate, which are allophonically voiced before vowels or approximants, are represented with voiced symbols (‹ d ›, ‹ g ›, ‹ dz ›). [f] occurs as an allophone of /s/ between /h/ and /r/, and this is also indicated in the orthography.

References

- Mithun, Marianne. The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

External links

- [http://www.languagegeek.com/rotinonhsonni/cayuga.html Cayuga] at LanguageGeek
- [http://www.ohwejagehka.com/cay-index.htm Ohwęjagehká: Ha’degaénage: Cayuga] Category:Languages of Canada Category:Iroquoian languages Category:Indigenous languages of the North American eastern woodlands

Mohawk language

Mohawk is a Native American language spoken in the United States and Canada. It is part of the Iroquoian family.

Phonology

Based on sound files available at http://www.ohwejagehka.com/lang.htm, the phoneme inventory appears to be as follows (using IPA notation):

Consonants

#There are no bilabials (unless one counts /w/ as labial rather than velar). #It is unclear whether aspiration is phonemic or a realization of C + /h/; probably the latter as ‘nh’ is /n/ + /h/, and ‘sh’ is /s/ + /h/ (not IPA ). #Listening to the syllabification of careful speech suggests that orthographic "ʦ" is indeed an affricate, since "tsh" corresponds to IPA — though it raises the question of why not use a single symbol for each of these? (After all, with such a small inventory, there are lots of Latin letters available!)

Vowels

#Length is contrastive. #Nasalization is contrastive. #There appear to be a high and low tone. (See tonal language.)

Some phrases

Naho:ten ken:ton'? - What does it mean?
Tiohrhen:sa sata:ti. - Say it in English, Speak in English.
Onkwehonwehneha sata:ti. - Say it in Indian. Speak in Indian.
Sa'nikonhraien:tas ken? - Do you understand?
Seni'nikonraien:tas ken? - Do you (d) understand?
Sewa'nikonhraien:tas ken? - Do you (p) understand?
Iah tewake'nikonhraien:ta's. - I don't understand.
Onhka thi? - Who's that?
Onhka ki? - Who's this?
Ontiaten:ro' ne thi. - That is my friend. (m to m)
Ontiaten:ro' ne ki. - This is my friend. (m)
Ontiatshi ne thi. - That is my friend. (f talking about f)
Ontiatshi ne ki. - This is my friend.(f)
Raterihwaienstha ken? - Is he a student?
Ionterihwaienstha ken? - Is she a student?
Saterihwaienstha ken? - Are you a student?
Ronterihwaienstha ken? - Are they (p,m) student?
Hen. - Yes
To:ka - I don't know.
Iah tewakaterien:tare'. - I don't know. (polite form)
Tanon' onhka ne: nakaonha? - And who is she?
Tanon' onhka ne: ne raonha? - And who is he?
Tanon' onhka ni:se'? - And who are you?
Tanon' onhka ne: ne rononha? - And who are they(p,m)?
Raterihwaienstha ni' ne'e. - He's a student, too.
Ionterihwaienstha ni ne'e. - She's a student, too.
Katerihwaienstha ni ne'e. - I'm a student, too.
Ronterihwaienstha ni ne'e - They (p,m) are students, too.
Ontiatshi ne'e. - She is my friend(f).
Ontiaten:ro' ne'e - He's my friend(m).
Ontiaten:ro' ne ki. - This is my friend(m).
Onkwaten:ro ne'e - They (p,m) are my friends

External links

- [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Mohawk-english/ Mohawk - English Dictionary]
- [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=moh Ethnologue] Category:Languages of Canada Language Category:Polysynthetic languages Category:Languages of the United States Category:Iroquoian languages Category:Indigenous languages of the North American eastern woodlands als:Kanien'keha:ka (Sprache)

Oneida language

Oneida is an Iroquoian language spoken primarily in the American states of New York and Wisconsin, and the Canadian province of Ontario. There are only an estimated 160 native speakers left, despite attempts to reinvigorate the language.

Phonology

There are four oral vowels, /i e o a/, and two nasal vowels, (written ) and (written . Vowel length is indicated with a following colon, <:>.

References

- Michelson, Karin E. and Doxtator, Mercy A. Oneida-English / English-Oneida dictionary. Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 2002. 1200 pages. ISBN 0802035906

External links

- [http://www.oneida-nation.net/language Oneida Indian Nation Language Project]
- [http://www.languagegeek.com/rotinonhsonni/oneida.html Oneida] Category:Languages of Canada Category:Languages of the United States Category:Iroquoian languages Category:Indigenous languages of the North American eastern woodlands

Erie

Places

Erie is the name of several places in the United States of America:

Bodies of Water

- Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes, for which much of the following is named
- The Erie Canal

Towns

- Erie, Colorado
- Erie, Illinois
- Erie, Kansas
- Erie, Pennsylvania

Townships

- Erie Township, Michigan, in Monroe County
- Erie Township, Ohio, in Ottawa County

Counties

- Erie County, New York
- Erie County, Ohio
- Erie County, Pennsylvania

Other Uses

- The Eriez is also the name of a tribe of Native Americans whose name is used for various locations.
- The Erie Railroad.
- Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938), often referred to as Erie, is a United States Supreme Court case which set forth the Erie doctrine, requiring federal courts to apply state law when exercising diversity jurisdiction.

Meherrin

The Meherrin are an Iroquoian tribe formerly residing on the river of the same name on the Virginia-North Carolina border. According to official colonial documents they were a remnant of the Susquehannock of upper Maryland, dispersed by the Iroquois about 1675. In the 1669 census of Virginia, however, they are found noted under the name "Menheyricks." It is possible that the influx of refugee Susquehannock a few years later may have so overwhelmed the remnant of the original tribe as to give rise to the impression that they were all of Susquehannock blood. They were commonly regarded as under the jurisdiction of Virginia, although their territory was claimed also by Carolina. They were closely related with the Nottoway.

Extinct languages

An extinct language (also called a dead language) is a language which no longer has any native speakers. Normally this occurs when a language undergoes language death while being directly replaced by a different one, for example, Coptic, which was replaced by Arabic, and many Native American languages, which were replaced by English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese. A more controversial usage of the term dead language, is to refer to an older language which changed significantly and evolved into a new language group. Latin, for example, is a dead language as it has no native speakers, but it is the base of the modern Romance languages. Likewise Sanskrit is the base of the modern Indo-Aryan languages and Old English is the base of Modern English. There are apparently children using Sanskrit as a revived language in Mathoor village (India) [http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1199965,curpg-1.cms]. In some cases, an extinct language remains in use for scientific, legal, or ecclesiastical functions. Latin, Old Church Slavonic, Avestan, Coptic, Old Tibetan and Ge'ez are among the many extinct languages used as sacred languages. A language that does have living native speakers is called a living language. Ethnologue claims there are 6,912 living languages known.[http://www.ethnologue.com/web.asp] In at least one case, Hebrew, an extinct liturgical language has been revived to become a living language. There have been other attempts at language revival (such as Manx and Cornish), but the success of these attempts has been subject to debate, as it is not clear they will ever become the common native language of a community of speakers.

Examples of recently extinct languages

Main article: list of extinct languages With last known speaker and date of death: # entire Alsean family ## Alsea: John Albert (1942) ## Yaquina: (1884) # Apalachee: (early 18th century) # Atakapa: (early 20th century) # Atsugewi: (1988) # Beothuk: Shanawdithit (white person name: "Nancy April") (1829) # entire Catawban family: ## Catawba: before 1960 ## Woccon # Cayuse: (ca. 1930s) # Chemakum: (ca. 1940s) # Chimariko: (ca. 1930s) # Chitimacha: Benjamin Paul (1934) & Delphine Ducloux (1940) # entire Chumashan family: Barbareño language was last to become extinct. ## Barbareño: Mary Yee (1965) ## Ineseño ## Island Chumash ## Obispeño ## Purisimeño ## Ventureño # Coahuilteco: (18th century) # Cochimí (a Yuman-Cochimí language): (early 19th century) # entire Comecrudan family ## Comecrudo: recorded from children (Andrade, Emiterio, Joaquin, & others) of last speakers in 1886 ## Garza: last recorded in 1828 ## Mamulique: last recorded in 1828 # entire Coosan family ## Hanis: Martha Johnson (1972) ## Miluk: Annie Miner Peterson (1939) # all Costanoan languages (which make up a subfamily of the Utian language family): (ca. 1940s) ## Karkin ## Mutsun ## Northern Costanoan ## Rumsen ## Soledad # Cotoname: last recorded from Santos Cavázos and Emiterio in 1886 # Esselen: report of few speakers left in 1833, extinct before end 19th century # Gabrielino (an Uto-Aztecan language): elderly speakers last recorded in 1933 # Galice-Applegate (an Athabaskan language): ## Galice dialect: Hoxie Simmons (1963) # Juaneño (an Uto-Aztecan language): last recorded in 1934 # Kakadu (Gagadju): Big Bill Neidjie (July 2002) # entire Kalapuyan family: ## Central Kalapuyan: ### Ahantchuyuk, Luckimute, Mary's River, and Lower McKenzie River dialects: last speakers were about 6 persons who were all over 60 in 1937 ### Santiam dialect: (ca. 1950s) ## Northern Kalapuyan: ### Tualatin dialect: Louis Kenoyer (1937) ### Yamhill dialect: Louisa Selky (1915) ## Yonkalla: last recorded in 1937 from Laura Blackery Albertson who only partly remembered it. # Kamassian: (1989) # Karankawa: (1858) # Kathlamet (a Chinookan language): (ca. 1930s) # Kitanemuk (an Uto-Aztecan language): Marcelino Rivera, Isabella Gonzales, Refugia Duran (last recorded 1937) # Kitsai (a Caddoan language): (ca. 1940) # Kwalhioqua-Clatskanie (an Athabaskan language): children of the last speakers remembered a few words, recorded in 1935 & 1942 ## Clatskanie dialect: father of Willie Andrew (ca. 1870) ## Kwalhioqua dialect: mother of Lizzie Johnson (1910) # Lower Chinook (a Chinookan language): (ca. 1930s) # Mahican: last spoken in Wisconsin (ca. 1930s) # Molala: Fred Yelkes (1958) # Mattole-Bear River (an Athabaskan language): ## Bear River dialect: material from last elderly speaker recorded (ca. 1929) ## Mattole dialect: material recorded (ca. 1930) # Miami-Illinois: (1989) # Mohegan: Fidelia Fielding (1908) # Natchez: Watt Sam & Nancy Raven (early 1930s) # Negerhollands: Alice Stevenson (1987) # Nooksack: Sindick Jimmy (1977) # Nottoway (an Iroquoian language): last recorded before 1836 # Pentlatch (a Salishan language): Joe Nimnim (1940) # Salinan: (ca. 1960) # entire Shastan family ## Konomihu ## New River Shasta ## Okwanuchu ## Shasta: 3 elderly speakers in 1980, extinct by 1990 # Siuslaw: (ca. 1970s) # Susquehannock: all last speakers murdered in 1763 # Takelma: Molly Orton (or Molly Orcutt) & Willie Simmons (both not fully fluent) last recorded in 1934 # Tasmanian: (late 19th century) # Tataviam (an Uto-Aztecan language): Juan José Fustero who remembered only a few words of his grandparents' language (recorded 1913) # Tetete an Ecuadorian language. # Tillamook (a Salishan language): (1970) # Tonkawa: 6 elderly people in 1931 # Tsetsaut (an Athabaskan language): last fluent speaker was elderly man recorded in 1894 # Tunica: Sesostrie Youchigant (ca. mid 20th century) # Ubykh: Tevfik Esenç (October 1992) # all dialects of Upper Chinook (a Chinookan language) are extinct, except for the Wasco-Wishram dialect. The Clackamas dialect began extinct in the 1930s, other dialects have little documentation. (The Wasco-Wishram dialect is still spoken by 6 elders.) # Upper Umpqua: Wolverton Orton, last recorded in 1942 # Vegliot Dalmatian: Tuone Udaina (Italian: Antonio Udina) (10 June 1898) # Wiyot: Della Prince (1962) # Yana: Ishi (1916)
See also

- :Category:Last native speakers
- Endangered language
- List of extinct languages
- Linguicide
- Language revival
Links

- [http://home.bluemarble.net/~langmin/miniatures/extinct.htm The Dodo's Fate: How languages become extinct]
Bibliography

- Brenzinger, Matthias (ed.) (1992) Language Death: Factual and Theoretical Explorations with Special Reference to East Africa. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Campbell, Lyle; & Mithun, Marianne (Eds.). (1979). The languages of native America: Historical and comparative assessment. Austin: University of Texas Press.
- Dorian, Nancy C. (1978). Fate of morphological complexity in language death: Evidence from East Sutherland Gaelic. Language, 54 (3), 590-609.
- Dorian, Nancy C. (1981). Language death: The life cycle of a Scottish Gaelic dialect. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
- Dressler, Wolfgand & Wodak-Leodolter, Ruth (eds.) (1977) Language death (International Journal of the Sociology of Language vol. 12). The Hague: Mouton.
- Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (Ed.). (2005). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (15th ed.). Dallas, TX: SIL International. ISBN 1-55671-159-X. (Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com).
- Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
- Mohan, Peggy; & Zador, Paul. (1986). Discontinuity in a life cycle: The death of Trinidad Bhojpuri. Language, 62 (2), 291-319.
- Sasse, Hans-Jürgen (1992) 'Theory of language death', in Brenzinger (ed.) Language Death, pp. 7–30.
- Schilling-Estes, Natalie; & Wolfram, Walt. (1999). Alternative models of dialect death: Dissipation vs. concentration. Language, 75 (3), 486-521.
- Sebeok, Thomas A. (Ed.). (1973). Linguistics in North America (parts 1 & 2). Current trends in linguistics (Vol. 10). The Hauge: Mouton. (Reprinted as Sebeok 1976).
- Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove. (2000). Linguistic genocide in education or worldwide diversity and human rights? Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0-8058-3468-0.
- ja:死語

Siouan languages

The Siouan (a.k.a. Siouan proper, Western Siouan) languages are a Native American

Iroquoian

Family division

Genetic relations

Culture

Bibliography

Language family

Largest families

Language families (spoken)

Africa and southwest Asia

Europe, and north, west, and south Asia

East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific

North America

Central America and South America

Language isolates (spoken)

Central & South America

North America

Asia

Africa

Europe

Sign languages

Creole languages, pidgins, mixed languages, and trade languages

Proposed language stocks

Other natural languages of special interest

External links

Bibliography

Mingo (tribe)

Tribal Name

Background

Language

See also

External links

Nasal consonant

See also

Notes and references

Notes

References

Phoneme

Background and related ideas

Notation

Examples

Arguments against the phoneme

Restricted phonemes

Neutralization, archiphoneme, underspecification

Non-phonemes

Phonological extremes

Writing systems

See also

External links

Wyandot language

Five Nations

Susquehannock

External links

Seneca language

Phonology

External links

Cayuga language

Dialects

Sounds

Vowels

Consonants

References

External links

Mohawk language

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Some phrases

External links

Oneida language

Phonology

References

External links

Erie

Places

Bodies of Water

Towns

Townships

Counties

Other Uses

Meherrin