Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009

Very well then.  You've convinced me.  I'm off to d'load Real Alernative and
delete RealPlayer.  I never liked it except when it occasionally worked.

MacHamish Mór

I post in Gaelic and French as well as in English and many people
speakers do not bother with accents as native speakers know how to
pronounce the appropriate words anyway or can choose the correct one
from personal knowledge. Gaelic has a few words where the accent
changes the meaning, like bata - a stick; bàta (ba\ta) pronounced with
a long vowel - a boat.

Gaelic is one of the most ingenious languages around in terms of its
orthography as there are some 60 sounds to be covered by 18 letters
and with a few rare exceptions, mostly because of the abolition of the
acute accent is phonetic. English, with 40 sounds and 26 letters is a
complete dog's breakfast by comparison.

Indeed English is the only non-phonetic language I can think of,
although I now hesitate to describe it as a language, concluding that
it is really a jargon or pidgin language like the Pidgin languages in
south east Asia or the North American trade languages like Chinook.

Inuktituk (Eskimo), being agglutinative like Turkish, is a bit
frightening at first glance and most native North American languages
with the exception of Lakota and related languages have been made
phonetic with the help of some very daunting-looking phonetics.

For example, Squamish, a Salishan language is spoken in Vancouver
where I live and taught in native schools. Here are the pronunciation
directions for a beginner.

Notes:
Because of the fact that the Squamish language is a spoken
language, several different written forms have been used to record and
express the language on paper. The orthography used in this dictionary
is based on the following rules.

1) There are 42 distinct and meaningful sounds

2) Sixteen of these can be represented by characters from the English
alphabet

3) The character <7> (number seven) is used to indicate a glottal
stop, which literally means a momentary closing of the glottis at the
back of the throat (ex. say the letter <k>... the very first part of
that action is a glottal stop)

4) an apostrophe represents an audible emphasis (or 'exploded'
emphasis according to the dictionary's author); if it appears above a
character, it is weakly emphasized; if it appears after the character,
it is strongly emphasized; for the purposes of displaying this through
Google Answers, I will use an apostrophe character, <'>, where it
means strongly exploded; and, I will use a doublequote character <">
where it means weakly exploded (ex. if the character is the letter <a>
with an apostrophe above it, I will show it here as <a">)

5) an underscore appearing under a character represents a guttural
sound; for the purposes of displaying this through Google Answers, I
will use an underscore character immediately following the underlined
character (ex. if the underlined character is the letter <c>, I will
show it here as <c_>, which you should read as 'an underlined c')

6) The letter <w> appearing after a <k> or an <x> means that the
preceding character is sounded using rounded lips.

In addition to these stated rules in the dictionary, I also noted the
use of a comma diacritical over some 'consonants' (as in, consonants
from the English alphabet). I believe that this denotes a shortened
sound. I will use a comma character <,> immediately following the
character to denote this (ex. if the comma diacritical appears about
the letter <w> it will appear here as <w,>).

Here is a wordlist:

outside     - ats'k_
earth          - temi"xw
world         - k_"ek_"si"n ti siya"t-shen
small         - etsi"m  (used when referring to an object only)
big             - hiyi"
rock           - smant
rocks         - smenma"nt
island        - skwetsa"s

Many Squamish have Hawai'ian last names like Nahanni as in the 19th
century many Hawai'ians worked as seamen (and were called Kanakas) and
in the Vancouver of those days, were prohibited from cohabitating with
white women, so married natives.

The Squamish Indian you would most likely have heard of is Chief Dan
George of "Big Little Man" fame. He was a lovely man and much
respected here by both whites and natives - we went to his funeral and
the police estimated that over 10,000 people turned out.

He was talking to my wife once, accompanied by a chief called Ernie
Philip from the Shushwap, an upcountry tribe. Dan George asked her if
she knew how the word "confusion" was interpreted by natives. She said
she didn't, and the old chief was overcome with laughter but finally
managed to gasp, "Father's Day on Ernie's reserve!" at which we all
burst into laughter, led by Ernie!

Michilín