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The Phonetics of Chitimacha

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Morris Swadesh
Morris Swadesh*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

As is shown in my paper, ‘The Phonemic Principle’, the only completely satisfactory method of treating the sounds of a language is to classify them according to the elemental types, or phonemes, recognized by the given language and to describe the types in terms of norms and ranges of deviation. The present paper presents such a description. The phonetic techniques employed in the course of the study were aural observation and reproductive experiment (attempting to pronounce words after the informant and getting his reaction to the reproduction). Now these are the techniques employed successfully by children in acquiring their native languages, but also employed without complete success by abnormal children and by most adult foreigners. However, a trained phonetician may ordinarily be expected to succeed if he takes sufficient pains. The only real deficiency in these techniques is that they do not provide a means of describing sounds with final accuracy and objectivity (such as is possible when laboratory instruments are used). In the present case, I am limited to a rough indication of the norms of the different phonemic types and sub-types; the normal deviation is practically nowhere sufficiently great to be measurable by my ear.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 10 , Issue 4-Part1 , December 1934 , pp. 345 - 362
Copyright
Copyright © 1934 Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 See Language 10. 117-29 (1934).

2 The study was made under the auspices of the Committee on Research in American Native Languages during the summers of 1932 and 1933.

3 Inconsistencies as to the form of particular words need not be mentioned here; for, although they added to the difficulty of ascertaining the phonemic composition of certain words, they do not affect the description of the separate phonemes.

4 This situation is not surprising in view of the fact that we have here two isolated survivals of the speech of a fairly large community. The differences may be traceable eventually to an original dialect differentiation when the Chitimacha dwelt in separate villages, or it may simply reflect differences such as are often to be found in fair-sized communities.

5 The glottal stop; if a convenient way of referring to this consonant is desired, it may be called ‘aleph’ after the Hebrew.

6 It was fairly easy to observe the syllabication even in running discourse. As an additional aid and check, the informant was asked to ‘divide the words’ and was given a few examples of what was desired. It is interesting to note that Benjamin always found ‘dividing the word’ difficult where a short vowel preceded a single consonant when the following syllable was ‘light’; his treatment in this case was usually not to make any division at such a point, saying therefore kit.kaŋ, čik.ne.mi, kap-nac.pikm.pa, etc. In dividing under other circumstances, he would sometimes make a fairly long pause between syllables when the preceding syllable was closed or ended in a long vowel; when the preceding syllable ended in a short vowel, the pause would always be very brief—this of course was to avoid giving the impression of a long vowel.

6a In the discussion of syllabication a period is used to indicate the point of syllabic division when it falls between phonemes. In the cases where syllabic division falls within a consonant, this consonant is printed in roman type.

7 This is doubtless the basis for the independent statements of both my informants that Chitimacha is a gently spoken language, not to be spoken loudly as English.

8 Several dictaphone records of Chitimacha speech were made for the purpose of studying the tonal phenomena in detail.

9 Whatever relatively exact information is given here was supplied by Mary Haas Swadesh who has made a preliminary study of the tonal phenomena. She hopes to make a more complete study in the near future.

10 English and other examples given contain sounds that are similar, though not necessarily more than approximately similar, to the Chitimacha sounds under discussion.

10a The open variety of i and of u is not quite so open as the English sounds given.

11 This occurrence of a defective phoneme only in demonstratives parallels the similar limitation of initial Ð in English.