Talk:Inuit language phonology and phonetics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of WikiProject Phonetics, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to phonetics and descriptive phonology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

	This article is part of WikiProject Indigenous peoples of North America, which collaborates on Native American, First Nations, and related subjects on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
???	This article has not yet been rated on the assessment scale.
Suggested article edit guidelines: To help us prioritise our workload, and in readiness for Wikipedia:1.0, we need to assess our articles for Quality. If this article is Unassessed, please assess it. See the Article Classification for instructions. If you disagree with a rating, you can change it or discuss it at Article Classification. Before assessing this article, be sure to check the existing Archive of assessments made under the previous system (used until July 2006), and feel free to help in migrating the existing comments besides from adding your own evaluation. After assessing this article's quality, please make sure it to add it to the Lists at Article Classification, following the grading scheme detailed there.
Please rate this article and leave comments here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.

[edit]

Is capital K used in Nunatsiavummiutut the same or related to Kra (letter) used in the Kalaallisut language? Andreas 02:34, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Two questions:

Is /ɬ/ really spelled ɫ (L with ~ through it) (which is the IPA symbol for "velarized or pharyngeal" [l])? Are you sure they don't use the originally Polish letter Łł (L with / through it) which e. g. Navajo uses for its own /ɬ/?

Where /q/ becomes a fricative, does it really become [ɣ], or does it stay uvular and becomes [ʁ]?

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 1:43 CEST | 2006/5/7

[edit] Qawiaraq or Qawariaq?

Someone needs to find out if the dialect is called Qawiaraq, or Qawariaq, and standardize the spelling throughout the article. Qawiaraq language exists on Wikipedia, but I don't know if that itself is misspelled. 24.159.255.29 19:08, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Needs cleaning up

Here are some things I found to be worded inaccurately or confusingly. I've reworded a few things, but I'm not sure how to rewrite the rest, since I haven't done the research to know exactly what's being said.

Retroflexes have disappeared in all the Canadian and Greenlandic dialects, except for the phoneme /ɟ/ in Natsilingmiutut, which derives from a former retroflex.

I'm not sure that sentence needs to be kept in the introduction; I think it makes sense to move it to the section "Retroflex consonants in western dialects" (what's there already tells part of the story, but needs to be cleaned up... see below). Also, it seems a little strange to say that the sound "disappeared" except for in Natsilingmiutut, where it became palatal. First, the sound in Natsilingmiutut shouldn't count as a retroflex since, notwithstanding its origin, it is not retroflex. Also, when you say it "disappeared," do you mean the sound actually become a phonological zero in other dialects? Or did it just undergo a change to another sound, as it did in Natsilingmiutut? (The gist of these questions is: what makes the Natsilingmiutut development any different from the development in other dialects?)

Section "Retroflex consonants in western dialects":

Natsilingmiutut retains as a phoneme the plosive, and often retroflex, palatal consonant /ɟ/.

This doesn't make sense. It can't be both palatal and retroflex, can it? Do you mean that sometimes it is palatal and other times retroflex?

In Inupiatun, the /ɟ/ of Natsilingmiutut and the /j/ in some central Inuktitut words has become [ʐ] (written r).

Do you really mean that /ɟ/ has become [ʐ], or merely that they correspond (and both derive from a common ancestral sound)? (The first option would only make sense if Inupiatun were descended from Natsilingmiutut, which doesn't seem to be true).

In addition to the voiced retroflex fricative /ʐ/ (written "r"), Inupiatun also has a voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/ written as "sr". This additional manner of articulation is largely distinctive to Inupiatun – it is absent from the more easterly dialects, except for the /ɟ/ of Natsilingmiutut.

A voiceless retroflex fricative has the same manner of articulation as a voiced retroflex fricative; it is not an "additional manner of articulation." Further, I don't understand how the /ɟ/ of Natsilingmiutut relates here at all; it isn't even voiceless, let alone retroflex. 24.159.255.29 19:48, 22 July 2006 (UTC)