User:Johanna-Hypatia/Linguistics/Lenape IPA

This is conjectured 18th-century Unami pronunciation as spoken in Western Pennsylvania. My two main sources have been the Lenape Talking Dictionary (featuring 20th-century Southern Unami vocabulary and pronunciation) and the 1888 Lenâpé-English Dictionary edited by Brinton & Anthony (in 18th-century Northern Unami dialect, including many archaic features and Munsee words, but garbled through a clumsy transcription system). I'm on the lookout for more reliable sources on 18th-century Southern Unami language.

Youghiogheny etymology needs more work
I'm not at all satisfied with the derivation of Youghiogheny, but the meaning of "it curves back on itself" is attested, and the lexeme I found which matched that verb, -okchaxk, is a poor fit phonetically. Heckewelder gave the etymon as /juxwiakhane/, but I have not found any better match for the lexeme -xwiak. I'm not sure that -xwiak can be gotten from -okchaxk. However, the current pronunciation of Youghiogheny in English, /jɑkəˈgeɪniː/, does suggest underlying phonemes /ɔ/ and /k/, with, presumably, the voicing of */k/>[g]. This can be accounted for if the phonetically complex sequence -chaxk- were simplified to /ək/~/əg/, as it is. I think it's plausible for *yuwokchaxk- to resolve into *yokag-. Another puzzle is then how the reduced vowel /a/>/ə/ got transcribed as "-io-." Perhaps the "-cha-" derives from palatalization of historical *kia-, which might account for the spelling. Thus *yuwokkiak- > *yokiag-?

Allegheny etymology
There are two related Lenape names underlying "Allegheny": 1) the name for the country between the Allegheny Front and the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, 2) the name of the Allegheny River itself. Zeisberger gives the former as Alligewinenk, glossed as "a land into which they came from distant parts." The latter name clearly incorporates the element -hane 'mountain river', and this form has become generalized for the territory as well.

I have been looking for a way to accurately reconstruct the original Unami names, based on the most reliable data I currently know of. I have tried spellings of Alegewinenk and then Alegwenink. Because I think the base etymon of both names can be derived from the roots a- 'go', lə- (for lən- 'people') and kwəni 'long'. With the locative suffix -nk, it forms the territory name Alegwenink. Compounded with hane 'river', it forms the river name *Alegwenihane.

Both names, when contracted to the base etymon a-lə-kwəni, became the single name Allegheny. The -h- in Allegheny comes from the -h- in the word for river, thereby matching the endings of several other river names derived from Lenape -hane, spelled -hanna or -heny in the English versions.

The forms I propose fit the phonetics of both Zeisberger's reported etymon and the modern name. Zeisberger reports a likely labialized velar in "Allig(e)winenk." If this name is derived from kwəni, that fits. But reportedly, in some 18th-century dialects, labialization was weak and sometimes was realized as aspiration: /kw/>[kʷʰ]~[kʰ]. This fits with the pronunciation and spelling of Allegheny. So we have a way to get from the earlier reported form to the English form known today.

I have to seriously consider a a different proposed explanation, deriving the name from welhik hane 'the best flowing river'. Alleghany, or as some prefer to write it, Allegheny,—the Algonkin name of the Ohio River, but now restricted to one of its branches,—is probably (Delaware) welhik-hanné or [oo]lik-hanné, 'the best (or, the fairest) river.' Welhik (as Zeisberger wrote it) is the inanimate form of the adjectival, meaning 'best,' 'most beautiful.' In his Vocabulary, Zeisberger gave this synthesis, with slight change of orthography, as "Wulach'neü" [or [oo]lakhanne[oo], as Eliot would have written it,] with the free translation, "a fine River, without Falls." The name was indeed more likely to belong to rivers 'without falls' or other obstruction to the passage of canoes, but its literal meaning is, as its composition shows, "best rapid-stream," or "finest rapid-stream;" "La Belle Riviere" of the French, and the Oue-yo´ or O hee´ yo Gä-hun´-dä, "good river" or "the beautiful river," of the Senecas. For this translation of the name we have very respectable authority,—that of Christian Frederick Post, a Moravian of Pennsylvania, who lived seventeen years with the Muhhekan Indians and was twice married among them, and whose knowledge of the Indian languages enabled him to render important services to the colony, as a negotiator with the Delawares and Shawanese of the Ohio, in the French war. In his "Journal from Philadelphia to the Ohio" in 1758, after mention of the 'Alleghenny' river, he says: "The Ohio, as it is called by the Sennecas. Alleghenny is the name of the same river in the Delaware language. Both words signify the fine or fair river." La Metairie, the notary of La Salle's expedition, "calls the Ohio, the Olighinsipou, or Aleghin; evidently an Algonkin name,"—as Dr. Shea remarks. Heckewelder says that the Delawares "still call the Allegany (Ohio) river, Alligéwi Sipu,"—"the river of the Alligewi" as he chooses to translate it. In one form, we have wulik-hannésipu, 'best rapid-stream long-river;' in the other, wuliké-sipu, 'best long-river.' Heckewelder's derivation of the name, on the authority of a Delaware legend, from the mythic 'Alligewi' or 'Talligewi,'—"a race of Indians said to have once inhabited that country," who, after great battles fought in pre-historic times, were driven from it by the all-conquering Delawares,—is of no value, unless supported by other testimony. That would entail accounting for the disappearance of the initial /w/-.

On the other hand, Zeisberger's interpretation could be corroborated in Lenape etymology if we take the syllable -lə- as a contraction of lən- 'person'. That would yield the meaning 'Where the People Went Far Away'.

Question of schwa-raising
The LTD lists eleven vowel phonemes in the Lenape language: /a/, /ʌ/, /e/, /ɛ/, /i/, /ɪ/, /o/, /ɔ/, /u/, /ʊ/, and /ə/. So I am wondering if the schwa phoneme might not have had a raised allophone, probably in stressed syllables, something like [ɯ] or [ɨ]. The 18th-century transcriptions usually write &lt;i&gt; for this vowel. My conjectures at 18th-century pronunciation have considered including this idea.

Before /w/, I always have it as schwa, though, because if it were [ɯ] in that position, *ɯw would likely coalesce to become /uː/. So keeping it as [ə] seems necessary to preserve the phoneme before /w/. This may be true before /l/ also, especially if it has a syllable-final allophone [ɫ].

Another possibility is that /ə/ remains [ə] in all positions, but that would not explain the frequent transcriptions with &lt;i&gt;. Particularly since the 18th-century transcriptions use largely German orthography, and German already has schwa, always spelled with &lt;e&gt;. Since it is also transcribed with &lt;e&gt; in stressed positions, as in Lenni, there are probably more complex phonological rules governing this vowel. Or the effect of the different editors working on the text at different times introduced some garbling. (I need good data!) It may be that the raising or shift to /ɪ/ belongs to Munsee phonology. (Compare Ossining, NY, of Munsee origin, with Unami ahsenink /ahsɯniŋk/ 'place of rocks'.) In any case, stress in Lenape is weak, which is borne out by the apparent inconsistency of schwa-raising in stressed syllables; other factors may prove more influential than stress.

The name Monongahela may even bear out this confusion. It's spelled with &lt;e&gt;, while the English pronunciation /məˌnɑŋgəˈhiːlə/ implies an underlying /ɪ~ɨ/ of some sort. And this is in southwestern Pennsylvania, where I believe Unami speech predominated during the Lenape period in that area (1720s–1780s). This suggests that the raised vowel is not a dialect divide, but is found across both dialects. In the audio files of the LTD, I hear schwa-raising from some of the native Lenape speakers, but not others. As far as I know, they're from the Delaware Tribe of Indians headquartered in Bartlesville, OK, and they're speaking Southern Unami dialect. Which is the one I was focusing on. They spell the word for 'mother's brother' as "shësa", indicating /ə/ in the first syllable, but in the accompanying audio file it's clearly pronounced [i] with the tense front vowel.

The Southern Unami word for 'mulberry tree' is transcribed as both ‹òkhatimënshi› and ‹òkhatimunshi›. A note on phonosyntactics says that /ə/ is raised to /u/ following /m/. However, on that page the speaker pronounces it [ɔkhatiˈmɨnʃi] with little or no rounding of the slightly raised and slightly backed central vowel, so that it falls short of being [ʉ] or [u] and sounds somewhere between [ə̃] and [ɯ], essentially an unrounded [ʊ]. It gets nasalized, though.

Voicing environments
Speaking of which, I notice some complexity in how the unvoiced consonants /k, p, t, tʃ/ become voiced intervocalically. There seems to be a consistent voicing of stops following nasals in initial and medial positions. (In fact, the shifts of ŋk>g, mp>b, and nt>d are strikingly reminiscent of the similar development in Modern Greek initial sounds.) Moreover, I'm hearing /ŋx/>[ŋɣ] in initial and medial position; e.g., nxaskwim [ŋɣʌskwim] 'my corn'. But in intervocalic positions, voicing seems to be applied only once in a while. Some of the speakers in the LTD apply voicing to final -nk, so that it sounds like [ŋg] or just [ŋ] (which bears out the many English transcriptions of Lenape names ending in -ing). On the other hand, there is the devoicing of /l/>[ɬ] in devoice-type environments.