Funky Feature Friday: !Xóõ Vowels

[Taronyu]

(First off: !Xóõ is pronounced with a click against the top of the mouth - hard to explain, but put pressure on the top and then snap the tongue down, and it sounds kind of like a bottle being opened. The a [ch] like in Scottish loch or german mochte - like a trill at the back of the throat. and then two o sounds, with one at the end being nasalised - so pronounce it as if there was an 'n' you couldn't say. Yeah, it's hard to do. I'm not sure i do it right either. Don't worry - that's not the point of this article.)

So, vowels are a bit ridiculous in some languages. Some languages, like Inuktitut (Inuit) and Classical Arabic, have only three vowels: i, a, u. That's a very small amount of vowels compared to English, which has around 12. Five vowel systems are fairly common. Now, when we say 'have vowels', I mean, they use different vowels in contrasting ways. The easiest way to understand this is in contrasting pairs. Here's a Na'vi contrasting pair:

fu: or
fo: they

You see that the only thing differing here is the o and u sound. So, those sounds are distinct and contrasting, and that needs to be shown in the language. Na'vi has seven vowels: you can probably name them all right now: a, i, o, u, e, ä, and ì. w and y are semi-vowels - let's not talk about what that means now.

Fun exercise: See how many contrasting pairs you can get in Na'vi, or how many you can get for in one position (For instance: fa, fì-, fo, fu - I bet that's the best you're going to get). Post your results here! I want to see what you guys come up with.

So, you're probably wondering what !Xóõ is at this point. It's a Khoisan language, like Xhosa, from southern Africa. It uses clicks, which are weird sounds you don't hear in other languages - that ! at the start of it's name is a click. I'm not going into those, now, partly because they are too cool for school, and partly because I think the vowels are actually more interesting. Maybe we'll get to those in another FFF. If you really want to learn about this, this guy is pretty awesome.

Xhosa Lesson 2. How to say "click" sounds.

But how could vowels be more interesting, you ask? Because there's so many of them!

Initially, !Xóõ has five vowels: a, i, e, o, and u (this is the normal five vowel system, as they are maximally distinctive - it's much easier to blend, say, a, i, e, ì, and ä only). But, these can appear in distinctive places differently, as:

Plain - just normal pronunciation
Breathy - kind of like a loud whisper
Creaky - sounds like a lot of glottal stops thrown in. You've heard this sound before, but the best word to describe it really is - creaky.
Pharyngealised - try saying it in your throat, with some spit thrown in. That's pretty close.
Strident - this is with a constricted air flow, so it sounds like there's an s in there (I think.)

And that's not it!

breathy creaky - both of them together.
creaky pharangealised - this one is awesome. Whenever I do it, I end up sounding like a cow, and I'm not sure that's right, though.
Strident creaky - both of these together, as well.

And that's still not it. All of these 8 can be nasalised, and that means something different, to. Think of the the french bón: there's no n actually made, but it sounds nasal. That's how these are done. Maybe I should load a youtube video trying to pronounce these, actually, this is hard to explain.

And that's still not the whole vowel system.

Because they also have tones, like chinese. This means that depending on the way they are said, in high pitch or low pitch or falling pitch - it can change the meaning. There's a disagreement as to how many tones: the eastern dialect has 4, and the western 2, but this may be the researchers fault. But that's still twice as many vowels.

So, at a rough estimate, that's 5 vowels x 8 different ways to pronuounce x 2 nasal differences (nasal and non-nasal) x 4 tones: 320 possibly distinctive vowel sounds. (probably less.)

That's just ridiculous.

['Oma Tirea]

I am not even sure how to pronounce the name of this super-maximalist Khoisan language without any IPA help

Even the number of click consonants (especially in the Western DoBes dialect) in a natural language like that is beyond me somehow....

Aside from that, here's another example of comtrasting vowels in Na'vi: ka, kä, ke, ki, ko (with kìm and kun being near-misses).  Probably the closest fko can get.

Spoiler

Basic letters for clicks in Khoisan languages (approx. front-to-back of the mouth): ʘ ǀ ǁ ǃ ǂ

[wm.annis]

Most of us can easily make creaky voice.  It's a feature of some people's normal speaking voice...

10 Features of Google Chrome

The woman doing the voiceover for this starts sentences with normal phonation, but tends to use creaky voice at the end of an intonation unit (i.e., where we'd put punctuation if we wrote out what she was saying).

I learned intentional creaky voice when I studied Mandarin.  The third tone is supposed to be a mid-low-high contour, but most of the time it's realized as low-tone creaky voice.

[kewnya txamew'itan]

That's very impressive. That even beats my conlang which I designed to have a crazy number of vowels (and pseudo-vowels). It only has a total of 78 different syllable nuclei (26 vowels and pseudo-vowels with 3 tones).

I guess I need to add different voicing to get more.

[Plumps]

That's really impressive... The more I read about this I'm relieved that Na'vi didn't turn out to be a tonal language It's highly interesting what the human sound range can do; which sounds we actually could produce...

As for your task

ma, mi, mì, (does me+ count here as well?)
na, ne
ka, ke, ki, ko, kä

Other examples would probably need another consonant or cluster...

How do diphthongs count in these minimal pairs?

['Oma Tirea]

What is Na'vi were stress-tonal, much like Japanese?  Anyway...

ma, mi-, mì+, (does me+ count here as well?)
na-, ne-, nì-
ka-, ke, ki, ko, kä

[Taronyu]

Dipthongs count, but they are odd because that is another phone in there. So, really, it's no different than having another character. The only thing that really counts in a dipthong is that it, on it's own, can stand as a syllable nucleus. So, say you had ya.wu and yaw.u - technically those could be a minimal pair. But that hasn't happened, and I suspect it won't, because the pronunciation is so minimally distinct as to be moot.

ln.skxawng - awesome idea. and nì- counts, as it is a morpheme - a collection of phonemes which carries with it it's own syntacto-semantic meaning.