St'at'imcets language: Encyclopedia II - St'at'imcets language - Sounds

St'at'imcets language - Sounds

St'at'imcets language - Consonants

St'at'imcets has 44 consonants:

• Obstruents consist of the stops, affricates, and fricatives. There are 22 obstruents.
• Sonorants consist of the nasals and approximants. There are 22 resonants.
• Glottalized stops are pronounced as ejective consonants. Glottalized sonorants are pronounced with creaky voice: /n’/ = [n̰].
• St'at'imcets contrasts glottalized sonorants with sequences of sonorants and glottal stops and even sequences of glottalized sonorants and glottal stops, for example, [ɣʷ’] ≠ [ʔɣʷ] ≠ [ɣʷʔ] ≠ [ʔɣ’ʷ] ≠ [ɣ’ʷʔ]. The contrast also exists for glottalized obstruents: [q’] ≠ [ʔq] ≠ [qʔ] ≠ [ʔq’] ≠ [q’ʔ].
• The dental approximants /z, z’/ are pronounced alternatively as interdental fricatives [ð, ð̰] or as dental fricative s [z̪, z̪̰], depending on the dialect of St'at'imcets.
• Nonretracted /ʧ/ is laminal [ʧ̻] while retracted /ʧˠ/ is apical [ʧ̺ˠ].
• There are four pairs of retracted and nonretracted consonants (which alternate morphophonemically). Retraction on consonants is essentially velarization. (Note also that St'at'imcets has retracted-nonretracted vowel pairs.)
  • /ʧ/ - /ʧˠ/
  • /ʃ/ - /ʃˠ/
  • /l/ - /lˠ/
  • /l’/ - /l’ˠ/
• Among the post-velar consonants, the stops and fricatives [q, qʷ, q’, q’ʷ, χ, χʷ] are all uvular while the post-velar approximants [ʕ, ʕʷ, ʕ’, ʕ’ʷ] are all pharyngeal approximants.
• Post-velar /q’, q’ʷ/ are realized as affricates: [q’ᵡ, q’ʷᵡ].

St'at'imcets language - Vowels

St'at'imcets has 6 vowels:

• The phonetic realization of the phonemes are indicated in brackets to the right.
• All retracted vowels are indicated by a dot under the vowel. These retracted vowels alternate morphophemically. (Note that St'at'imcets also has retracted consonants.)
• The retracted vowel /ẹ/ and the non-retracted vowel /a/ are both pronounced [ɛ] (thus there is a phonetic overlap).

St'at'imcets language - Phonotactics of roots

St'at'imcets language - Orthography

The following table shows the vowels and consonants and their respective orthographic symbols.

St'at'imcets language - Phonological processes

• epenthetic /ə/.

Post-velar Harmony (retraction):

• Within roots, there is a restriction that all consonant and vowel retracted-nonretracted pairs must be of the same type. That is, a root may not contain both a retracted and a nonretracted vowel or consonant. This is a type of Retraced Tongue Root harmony (also called pharyngeal harmony) involving both vowels and consonants that is an areal feature of this region of North America, shared by other Interior Salishan and non-Salishan languages (for example see Chilcotin vowel flattening).

• In addition to the root harmony restriction, some suffixes harmonize with the root to which they are attached. For instance, the inchoative suffix /-ɣʷél’x/:

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Sounds", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki