Is it a /g/ or is it a /k/?

One of my objectives on this trip is to collect a clean phonemic inventory of Satawalese - the sounds that Satawalese speakers use everyday in their language. Other scholars who have worked with Trukic languages have attempted to do this, and to an extent, have determined the major phonemes of Satawalese. It doesn't hurt to verify this information once again. Since the works of Frederick Jackson (1983) and Edward and Hiroko Quackenbush (1968 and 1970, respectively) had a much larger foci - historical comparisons of the region's languages, using the sound systems, vocabulary, and other linguistic features, to offer suggestions as to when these languages 'broke off' from one another and began to develop on their own - I have chosen to concentrate strictly on the documentation of Satawalese, as a related, yet independent language of the Trukic Group. My main objective is to find out how this language differs from its sister languages in the region. Jackson and the Quackenbushes were working with data from a number of these languages (one has to admire how they all could have kept their data organized without personal computers!). Each made references to Satawalese here and there and all elicited data directly from Satawalese speakers, rather than relying on written accounts from others.

To complicate matters, I suspect Jackson et.al.  worked with Satawalese speakers who were proficient in a few of the region's other languages - Woleaian, Ulithian, Yapese, and Chuukese - and the speakers could have understandably provided the wrong information about words or phrases. Since these speakers are polyglots in languages that are similar to one another, it's understandable if there is some confusion regarding a particular form, as in some cases, these forms may be identical, somewhat similiar, similiar or different enough to be unintelligible to one another completely. I am finding this the biggest challenge of working in the middle of a "dialect continuum" - the attempt to distill a 'pure' Satawalese dialect/language - does it really exist, and if so, can I really do it? In a language continuum, where does one 'language' or 'dialect' stop, and the other begin? Are the differences phonetic (sounds), morphological (word formation), syntactic (word order), semantic (word meaning), or all of this? Even those who are not linguists might correctly guess this answer - it's ALL OF THESE!!!

Some of you may wonder what the difference is between a language and a dialect. First you might want to know the difference between a language and a dialect. I won't go there with you, because I'm not sure myself. Other linguists are hesitant to define it. Sometimes political borders make the distinction, as in Scandanavia. Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish are not that far apart in intelligibility but all three are politically independent, and hence, each has determined that the languages they speak are distinct and should be treated as such.   Here is what Terralingua says on this matter.

I recently purchased a new laptop and noticed that the Microsoft Windows platform allows English speakers to configure their machines to the following "Englishes" : Australia, Belize, Canada, Caribbean, Ireland, Jamaica, New Zealand, Philippines, Trinidad, United Kingdom, United States, and Zimbabwe? I suspect that some of this configuration might instruct a computer to set its clock according to where one is in the world, but what else is different in a computer operating system that would prompt Microsoft to create 12 configurable divisions of the English language? Are there spearate nomenclatures for things, such as UK's car 'boot' is a US 'trunk?' That a US 'parking lot' is a UK 'car park'? Is a 'computer mouse' the same in the English of Belize and the English of Trinidad? The Microsoft people must have some compelling evidence to make these distinctions available to computer users. Is it only to recognize them as politically distinct, maybe, and bolster their egos? Think of all of those people in tiny Trinidad who have an Windows XP English configuration all to themselves! And Belize is not that far away. If anyone can clarify this, please do so and I will post it.] I will eventually research this on my own, because I'm curious.  

As we all know, English spoken around the world can be very different - in fact, Linguist Steven Weinberger has an excellent site that he and his students have been developing for quite some time - they collect samples of English spoken all over the world. I've contributed a few samples to his collection, and you can too! Check out his site here.

Back to topic. In an earlier post, I talked about the importance of collecting an inventory of a language's distinct sounds to better understand it. A linguist tries to collect samples of the language that clearly show that sounds are distinctive from one another, and this is usually done by attempting to get pairs of word that differ in the one sound you're trying to determine are variants of one sound, or two distinctive sounds. For example, in English, the words 'pin' and 'bin' mean different things - the English language makes a phonemic distinction between the a voiceless bialabial /p/, and a voiced bilabial /bp/. The two are articulated the same way, except one does not use the voice, and one does. Securing two nearly identical words where the sounds in question are in identical positions can help determine distinct sounds.

In Satawalese,  /p/ and /pw/, for example, are considered two completely distinctive sounds - to my ears, they're identical, but when I watch them say the words, I can detect more rounded lips when they say /pw/ - in fast speech, I cannot tell the difference, but THEY can! The 'w' following the 'p' indicates that this particular sound is more rounded, and they have chosen these two letters to represent the sound in their written language. We do not make a /p/ and /pw/ distinction in English. The world's languages are full of examples of this. Remember before I cited some other examples that some of you may be familiar with - /p/ and /f/ in Tagalog (Filipino), /l/ and /r/ in Japanese, and one I forgot to mention - /b/ and /p/ in Arabic - the pairs of sounds in each of those three languages is not distinctive, so speakers can use either sound for words and their listeners will understand them. [I remember riding in a cab in Amman once, and the driver was commenting on all of the bink [pink] houses in the neighborhood he lived in.]

Native English speakers might also be familiar with difficulty in the vowels of some European languages. Some European languages have a lot of vowel distinctions that are very difficult for Americans to learn, as we do not have these very minute vowel distinctions in English. For example  toe-may-toe [American English] and toe-mah-toe [UK English] are readily understood. We as English speakers don't make a distinction between these two vowels in any words I can think of, but other languages do.

Back to topic - does Satawalese have a /g/, or a /k/, or both, or what? I'm still trying to conclusively determine that - once I have tracked down these evasive sounds, and pull off their masks to determine their true identify(ies), you'll hear it here first.