What language is this?
May 27, 2018 1:31 PM Subscribe
A family member was driving through Port Angeles, Wash., today and posted a photo of this sign on social media, asking what language it is. We have surmised that it's a First Nations language. If so, does anybody know specifically which tribe?
Best answer: And in case it’s not clear, those symbols are not native, they are IPA, used to represent the phonetics. So e.g. that belted I is a voiceless dental or alveolar fricative.
Perhaps someone with a little more time and skill at IPA if not the Klallam language could suggest some rough pronunciations via other methods.
posted by SaltySalticid at 2:00 PM on May 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
Perhaps someone with a little more time and skill at IPA if not the Klallam language could suggest some rough pronunciations via other methods.
posted by SaltySalticid at 2:00 PM on May 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
Best answer: So e.g. that belted I is a voiceless dental or alveolar fricative.
In the IPA, that would be θ and s, which are both sounds in English (the first sounds of "thin" and "sin"). That's actually a belted lowercase L, and is the symbol for the voiceless lateral fricative - which English doesn't have. It's hard to describe articulation in a layman friendly and understandable way, but it's like an "s" where, instead of the air streaming over the top of the tongue, streams around the sides of the tongue.
This actually isn't IPA, though - č isn't an IPA symbol. This is Americanist transcription for the "ch" (as in "church") sound. It's a different system that overlaps a lot with the IPA but has important differences.
As a side note, several Native American languages use symbols from linguistic transcription in their alphabets - especially in the Pacific Northwest, where there are languages with a lot of sounds that would be difficult to represent with just the English alphabet. These alphabets aren't "native," in the sense that Native Americans didn't invent them ... but hey, the English alphabet isn't native either. We stole it from the Romans, who stole it from the Greeks, who stole it from the Phoenicians, and so on.
I believe that this street name is something like "CHAH-nguhlch SOOL", if I'm interpreting the acute accents as stress right. But you can't really represent it with English spelling, because it has non-English sounds. That ʔ is a glottal stop (the middle sound in uh-oh), and there's no way to spell the lateral fricative that would make sense to English speakers who don't also know, like, Xhosa or something.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 2:26 PM on May 27, 2018 [13 favorites]
In the IPA, that would be θ and s, which are both sounds in English (the first sounds of "thin" and "sin"). That's actually a belted lowercase L, and is the symbol for the voiceless lateral fricative - which English doesn't have. It's hard to describe articulation in a layman friendly and understandable way, but it's like an "s" where, instead of the air streaming over the top of the tongue, streams around the sides of the tongue.
This actually isn't IPA, though - č isn't an IPA symbol. This is Americanist transcription for the "ch" (as in "church") sound. It's a different system that overlaps a lot with the IPA but has important differences.
As a side note, several Native American languages use symbols from linguistic transcription in their alphabets - especially in the Pacific Northwest, where there are languages with a lot of sounds that would be difficult to represent with just the English alphabet. These alphabets aren't "native," in the sense that Native Americans didn't invent them ... but hey, the English alphabet isn't native either. We stole it from the Romans, who stole it from the Greeks, who stole it from the Phoenicians, and so on.
I believe that this street name is something like "CHAH-nguhlch SOOL", if I'm interpreting the acute accents as stress right. But you can't really represent it with English spelling, because it has non-English sounds. That ʔ is a glottal stop (the middle sound in uh-oh), and there's no way to spell the lateral fricative that would make sense to English speakers who don't also know, like, Xhosa or something.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 2:26 PM on May 27, 2018 [13 favorites]
Best answer: Hi! Linguist here! Was coming in to say essentially this:
So: The Klallam language has an official alphabet just like Spanish does. That alphabet uses some non-ASCII characters just like the Spanish alphabet does. Some of those symbols, like "č," are shared with European languages and used in familiar ways. Some of them, like "ƛ," were invented by linguists working with New World languages. But they're real letters, in a real alphabet, and not just phonetic symbols.
posted by nebulawindphone at 2:31 PM on May 27, 2018 [12 favorites]
These alphabets aren't "native," in the sense that Native Americans didn't invent them ... but hey, the English alphabet isn't native either. We stole it from the Romans, who stole it from the Greeks, who stole it from the Phoenicians, and so on.This is important because there's a lot of stigma attached to the idea that indigenous languages "aren't written languages," as if that made them less important, less real, or less able to have a grammar or express complicated concepts.
So: The Klallam language has an official alphabet just like Spanish does. That alphabet uses some non-ASCII characters just like the Spanish alphabet does. Some of those symbols, like "č," are shared with European languages and used in familiar ways. Some of them, like "ƛ," were invented by linguists working with New World languages. But they're real letters, in a real alphabet, and not just phonetic symbols.
posted by nebulawindphone at 2:31 PM on May 27, 2018 [12 favorites]
Best answer: I find the written SENĆOŦEN (spoken by the W̱SÁNEĆ people on the Saanich Peninsula on Vancouver Island) alphabet especially interesting, because it was designed to be easy to type on an English typewriter while still being compact. The extra "non-roman" letters can be made by typing a roman capital letter, backspacing, and typing punctuation on top of it. Also notable is that, unlike most indigenous language alphabets, SENĆOŦEN was created by a member of the W̱SÁNEĆ Nation rather than an outsider.
posted by borsboom at 2:47 PM on May 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by borsboom at 2:47 PM on May 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
Best answer: So corrected, thanks. I saw several IPA-ish symbols and jumped to the wrong conclusion. I’m still a little unclear on why the slashed lambda is not considered phonetic if it was invented by outsiders for transcription, but I guess I can ask my own question if I need to :)
posted by SaltySalticid at 3:28 PM on May 27, 2018
posted by SaltySalticid at 3:28 PM on May 27, 2018
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posted by clawsoon at 1:34 PM on May 27, 2018 [6 favorites]