Talk:Ottawa phonology

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It would be interesting to have some accustic data for the average length of some fortis and lenis consonants. "Secondarily-arising word-initial consonant clusters reflect a pattern of Reduplication of verb roots that forms many Ottawa words." If possible, the semantic range of the meanings of such reduplications could be addressed, and it could be addressed (be it thematic to this article or not) how Ottawa compensates for the absence of this reduplication.

Furthermore, are there any other notable phonetic or phonological peculiarities in the Ottawa dialect? Just as an information for rating this article, for I'm not familiar with the topic and thus cannot judge myself whether this article (that is complete as far as it goes) fulfills the completeness demand for B class.

Reading the article, I almost got the impression that you are explaining the topic almost a bit too patiently. But that's probably necessary, just compare my rather too short sketch of Darkhad dialect. Seriously, I'm a bit jealous of the quality of data that you seem to have for several related North American dialects. Much more modern high-quality data than in Mongolian studies.

G Purevdorj (talk) 18:34, 15 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm not aware of any instrumental studies on consonant duration so can't add anything there.
 * The comments re reduplication are duly noted, but probably will not do a lot here since the focus is on phonology. Reduplication is somewhat understudied in Ojibwe.
 * There are many peculiarities in Ottawa phonology. :) It has innovated extensively relative to other dialects of Ojibwe, with the impact of vowel syncope triggering a series of other innovations. These are discussed in the article. The focus of the article overall is on features that distinguish Ottawa from general Ojibwe, but when I have time I will add more general information.
 * This article was split from the Ottawa language article, and I am busy with the GA review for that. Once that is done I will try to spend more time on this one, so whatever rating it gets at this point is fine. Perhaps when I have had time to add more, I'll ask you to come and look it over for rating purposes.
 * I try to write in a way that I think is comprehensible for someone who is not familiar with Algonquian languages or does not have a lot of expertise in linguistics. But any time you go into details, the complexity level increases quickly, so it's a balancing act.
 * Through a lot of work in the last thirty years by several dedicated linguists (especially Richard Rhodes and J. Randolph Valentine, plus foundational work by Leonard Bloomfield), Ottawa is very nicely documented, with grammars, texts, and a good dictionary. Wikipedia is dependent upon the quality of available source materials, so for Mongolian someone may have to go out and do some field work.
 * Thanks. John Jomeara421 (talk) 13:37, 16 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm working on that :-). Regards, G Purevdorj (talk) 14:14, 16 February 2009 (UTC)