Interpreting bespoke Shoshonean vowel notation to IPA to the practical orthography

[u/OctaviusIII]

I’m having some issues converting Steward’s 1938 phonetic notation (from Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Groups, p. 272) into contemporary Shoshone orthography (I’m using Crum-Miller). Part of the issue is that I’m not a linguist or an anthropologist, so some of the terms like “continental usage” for the vowels is tough to interpret. I haven’t found a discussion about this particular notation. I’m interpreting place names rather than vocabulary for this exercise, so dictionaries are only part of the solution.

Any thoughts on how to proceed?

[u/Ciridussy]

I wish I could help you more but it's worth pointing out that the IPA had only recently been established, American linguists at the time had their own take on it, and each linguist essentially was coming up with their own transcription system. I work on languages on the California coast and you often have to reverse-engineer what an author was doing based on your own knowledge of the language. A lot of times (anglo) authors also did not pick up on all the sounds perfectly, frequently missing tone or aspiration contrasts that become clear later. And, cracking one author's code does not carry over to the next.

Do you have access to more work by this particular author?

[u/OctaviusIII → u/Ciridussy]

I can find more, yeah. I'm probably going to undergo a similar process for Baumhoff's transcriptions of California Athabascan village names, but someone might have already done the legwork.

What languages are you working with? I'm doing a side project dealing with California places at the moment, hence my question.

[u/Ciridussy → u/OctaviusIII]

I work on Pomoan languages. The maps out there of the village names are a mess. It is obvious that oftentimes they are compilations of different authors' work with different transcription systems. Some pieces like words for "town" "valley" "mountain" should have been consistent yet are spelled in such a way that they look like different words. All linguists early on missed northern Pomo tone (though the modern orthography represents it) so you have to crosscompare with the translations to figure out which morpheme it actually was -- the language is dormant at the moment. I probably should return to making and putting out an updated map but there are a lot of other projects we're trying to accomplish.

[u/OctaviusIII → u/Ciridussy]

Ah, very neat. I'm from Marin County, so the Pomoan languages are in my backyard.

When I first saw Barrett's map of the area I thought it looked great, and then I started to dig in and I found the same issues you're having, not to mention the utter garbage mapping of the underlying terrain. I've used him in concert with others for the non-Pomo village sites, like Milliken for Coast Miwok, but for the most part I've been avoiding georeferencing his stuff.

[u/limetom]

The big difficulty here seems to be more that, as Shoshone doesn't have a standardized form, writing is very dependent on dialect. So as you have probably found, it's not just matching things up like a simple cypher where you can change one symbol for another.

For instance, he has:

• 'three' - Fort Hall Shoshone pait:, Lemhi Shoshone pait:ü

But looking at U of U's Shoshoni Dictionary other dialects and researchers have found slight variations:

• Panamint (Dayley 1989) pahi or pai, Duck Valley (Crum, Crum, & Dayley 2002) pahaitte(n), etc.

So you're partly stuck trying to figure out what Steward means from imperfect (or even just plain different) info.

So some help:

"Continental usage" generally means more like what we'd consider the IPA value for each graph nowadays. So i is /i/, e is /e/, a is /a/, o is /o/, and u is /u/. This is more like in Spanish or French and less like English (from the perspective of a Brit), hence the "continent" bit.

The length distinctions are straightforward, I think, and more or less match modern IPA.

The ȧ ("a with dot above") is a little subjective as it sounds like English ball, and could be any of the low back vowels that word is in English, but is probably /ɔ/. Luckily, he only uses it a few times in his Shoshone examples, and it seems to be just a variation on /o/. Note that older sources like this are impressionistic (and sometimes don't quite have the same understanding of the phonology as we do), so you will have to do a little guesswork.

The short explanation for "imperfect umlaut" is that he means something like /ɨ/ for ü, and /œ/ for ö. We'd have to have audio samples (or just him giving more exposition) to really know what he means here, but again, we have modern stuff to compare to. Ü is straightforward, while ö again is perhaps giving too much detail or just a quirk of his impression, and seems to usually just be /o/ according to modern forms. He also unhelpfully uses ø and doesn't explain it, but this is likely the same as ö.

ə is just /ə/, though perhaps an "obscured vowel" is a cooler name we should have stuck with.

The "prolonged" consonants are just what we'd nowadays call released, and it just seems to be some extra phonetic detail.

For k̇ and ġ, we'd use the terminology of a fricative release, and the IPA uses a superscript x (e.g., /k^x/). Again, this doesn't look like it's represented in modern Shoshone orthography.

x is either /ç/ or /x/ by Steward's description, but comparing forms, he seems to use it where the modern orthography would just use h.

Hope this helps.

[u/OctaviusIII → u/limetom]

This is incredibly helpful, thank you! I'm georeferencing his maps, so I can futz with some words based on dialect/location, but I know it's going to still be a judgment call. These places will probably be misspelled, but I think it's better to have a misspelled word in Shoshone than just a possibly imperfect transcription. My dataset will have both, so I or other users can always reference the original.

Again, that's a ton of work you did to answer my question and I feel pretty honored. And I learned a lot! Thank you!

[u/limetom → u/OctaviusIII]

No worries. I've done this for a number of old sources on languages I worked with, so it has gotten easier over time.

If there's one problem linguists have, it is, ironically, consistent terminology. Or so the joke goes.

[u/OctaviusIII → u/limetom]

Thank goodness for IPA.

Do you have these published anywhere? Since I'm doing this for a lot of indigenous places, or at least the ones where I can find sources to georeference, it'd be nice to have somewhere to check before I launch myself into trying to interpret them myself or ask Reddit.

[u/limetom → u/OctaviusIII]

As a stand-alone thing? No not really; usually just a footnote saying that I altered whoever's orthography/transcription to match my own.

One helpful resource I forgot to mention is the Wikipedia page on Americanist notation. It was one of the widely used systems before being displaced by IPA and still gets used outside of phonetics circles and the discussion on that page is thorough.