Talk:Xavante language

Xavante /w/ and velars
[copied from my talk page—kwami (talk)]

Not that I speak Portuguese, but I took não-arredondado to mean "non-rounded", not "wholly un-labial" - i.e. a similar compress'd /w/ as in Japanese. Note how she still groups it with the labials. Maybe we could settle at lack of phonemic velars. (I wonder if the language has maybe had a similar k > shift as in Hawai'ian.)

Good work BTW! -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 22:19, 29 November 2008 (UTC)


 * I suspect that the shift was k to tch, but that should be easy enough to check with other Ge languages.


 * Regardless of the form of rounding, the /w/ is presumably still phonetically velar. I'm not sure what a lack of "phonemic" velars would mean--we dictate that they are not velar because there are no other velars? That seems a bit like declaring that a language with [s] has no fricatives because it lacks [f], [x], and [h], or that Samoan has no alveolars despite having an [l]. kwami (talk) 22:29, 29 November 2008 (UTC)
 * We still appear to be comfortable telling that X. lacks nasals on a phonemic level. I can see no explicit note about velarity, on the contrary she notes "there are sonorants at the bilabial, alveolar and glottal places of articulation".


 * Hm, and it's anyway "não-arredondado posterior fechado alto sonoro" - after "closed high" (?) sonorants. McLeod & Valerie's '03 paper tells it's pronounced "as in English after /i/, without rounding and with a little friction" - as well as "without friction and more rounded in outros ambientes", whatever that means. We can probably agree that English /w/ is not, so this remains still unclear.


 * I would presume /w/ not to be purely velar in a language that lacks velars otherwise, any more than it to be purely labial in a language that otherwise lacks labials. -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 15:32, 1 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I hadn't checked (2003). That does support your edits.


 * Phoneme tables are frequently arranged more for convenience than for precision. If there's no other need for a velar column, then one's unlikely to add on just for /w/. Likewise, if there's no labio-velar column (as in English), then one's unlikely to add one just for /w/, but that doesn't mean English /w/ is not labio-velar. From the (2003) comment you pointed out, Xavante /w/ would appear to be labio-velar:


 * antes da letra ‘i’ é pronunciado como o ‘w’ inglês, sem arredondamento dos lábios e com um pouco de fricção. Em outros ambientes não há fricção e os lábios se arredondam mais


 * "before the letter 'i' it's pronounced as the English 'w', without rounding of the lips and with a bit of friction. In other environments it doesn't have friction and the lips are more rounded"


 * Since in general we define phonemes by their 'elsewhere' values, we should probably consider this a more-or-less typical /w/ with a non-rounded semi-fricative allophone (≈ ) before /i/.


 * As far as the 1974 não-arredondado posterior fechado alto sonoro description, as far as I can tell that's a "non-rounded high/closed back semivowel"—the authors characterize all semivowels with the terms for the equivalent vowels. Taking that comment literally, she means it's the semivowel equivalent of the high back unrounded vowel, or in other words, . But the (2003) description would appear to trump that characterization.

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