Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: The Valley Nisenan Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection Author: A.L. Kroeber Source(s): UC Publications in American Archaeology & Ethnology, Volume 24 # of Pages: 20 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

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Kroeber: The Valley Nisenan Si 281 “father. Surd stops were recorded both aspirated and unaspirated. “The distinction may be functional; or the stops written as unaspirated ‘surds and as sonants may really constitute only one series: the sonants F ppear to have a less prolonged sonancy than in English. . Two uliar sonants were heard, bY and d’, different from b.and d;:in the former a heavy labialization seemed to obtrude, in the latter, glottal‘ization. These evidently correspond to Dixon’s ‘‘inspirational’’ b dd.** Final surd stops are often not released ; that is, they consist ly of occlusion: k, ¢, p. These were difficult to distinguish from me another and from glottal stops, and errors may have crept into he record. There are also released final surd stops. Glottalized stops were not heard at the ends of words. The surd stops occur interocalically with lengthened occlusion: k’, t’, p’, also t’e. The inform~ ant’s loss of upper teeth made the determination of the dental-alveolar group uncertain as to true dental articulation. Mostly t and d were heard alveolar, about as in English. A post-alveolar or pre-palatal t was repeatedly recorded, but also confused with te. Continuants.—These include s, s, ¢, j; . and J; m, m, n, 2; W, Y; h, h; and the affricatives ts, te. There are probably. two organic s-sounds, s and ¢, the latter made with less flat tongue than English sh, and s representing a more s-like apperception of it. Inter-vocalic was sometimes doubtfully heard sonant and written j, as in pujune. It may be questioned whether this is a separate organic constituent of the language. Its limitation of position suggests sonant infection .of : by the adjacent vowels. There appear to-be two l-sounds: / is thick in quality, and perhaps produced with more sudden articulation both i) APPENDIX: LANGUAGE Be Since there is practically no Nisenan linguistic material accessible. beyond old word lists, the vocabulary obtained is given in full. Manys minor points of culture have been embodied therein. For this reason the arrangement is topical, not alphabetical: It must be borne ine mind that this vocabulary represents the extreme southwestern forinl of Nisenan, and of the Maidu stock as well; and that both in the valley along lower Feather river and in the hills on the middle courses of American river, speech, though still Nisenan or Southern Maidu, was 3 somewhat different. 3 bine satis IR BEL i Pe an ee Phonetics 4 Vowels.—An a of less clear quality than ‘‘normal’’ a, due probably 4 to partial tongue elevation, was occasionally heard, as in Aka’n, a small” fish; but being observed only in short syllables, it may not be an organic sound of the language. The vowels e, i, 0, u are usually if not _ always open. <A few cases of apparent closer quality have been indi~ eated by the macron, thus, i’. Of impure vowels, both ii and 6 seem 5 to occur. They are unrounded, as in Shoshonean and Yokuts, and ‘ perhaps better represented by i and é. Of the two, ii is much the . commoner; 6 possibly represents only a variant apperception. Final vowels—and it may be assumed all vowels organically—seem either to end in a surd aspiration or in a glottal stop: a‘ and a’. The ~ feebleness of the informant’s larynx led to many being recorded with— out differentiation of termination. Most of these are likely to be : aspirated, the glottal stop being generally easier to hear. An initial : glottal stop was sometimes recorded, but more often is likely not to have been heard. at beginning and end. It was chiefly recorded finally, sometimes initially. The nasal continuants are often surd when findl: m,n. A _ glottal stop was sometimes detected, and sometimes not, between vowel and consonant: a’n and an. I suspect that all final sonant nasals were " imperfectly written: an should always be an, but az and a’n differ. There is no # (ng) on careful enunciation; nor x (palatal fricative) ; an occasional somewhat constricted h preceding another consonant has been written h. Length.—Long vowels and consonants have been indicated by the same device, a superior period. Long consonants recorded are the stops, 1, n,m, w. They occur chiefly after short vowels. Syllables are long, accordingly, either in the vowel or in the consonant. Diphthongs are frequent: ai, ei, iii, Gi, ui, au, iu, ete., and of a 4 duration equivalent to a single long or short vowel. Where the vowels seemed to constitute separate syllables without an intervening glottal 4 stop, they have been separated by a hyphen. Stops——These appear to occur in three series, surd, sonant, and ~ . glottalized: The latter are feeble, and may not always have been ‘ distinguished. They are both organic, as in k’um, dance house, and induced (stop + glottal stop) as in nik’e’i (nik-’e’i), my older brother— . WT rete pes: RMR tS AB 33 Bur. Am. Ethn., Bull. 40, pt. 1:684, 1911. An CES ery ms et. nik’ai (nik-ka“i), my great-grandfather, nik-pa’pa, my mother’s [ -sersnemecesnaeseeererer ae seepeeenepmrialigeinnnr oceecipaae ae