onPhonetic structures of Aleut

• Main Authors: Alice Ta, Lorna Rozelle, Taehong Cho, Peter Ladefoged, Moses Dirks, Jacob Wegelin
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1999
• Subjects: spoken languages in the world; Mandarin Chinese; Spanish; English; aleut; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.563.6562; http://tcho.hanyang.ac.kr/papers/Taff_Rozelle_Cho_Ladefoged_JPhon_2001_rfm.pdf

A detailed analysis of the phonetic structures of Aleut, a moribund language spoken in Alaska, shows how much general phonetic information can be gathered from the investigation of an endangered language. Aleut has an unusual distribution of consonants, with varying functional loads. There are no bilabial stops. Among alveolar, velar and uvular stops, VOT is shorter for alveolar than for velar or uvular stops, but, despite current general phonetic theories, there is no di!erence in VOT between velar and uvular stops. VOT is also longer before long vowels than before short vowels. Uvular consonants have a signi"cant e!ect on the formants of following high vowels. There are three vowels and a vowel length contrast. Again, despite previous general phonetic predictions concerning languages with vowel-length contrasts, length plays a role in characterizing stress. Contrastive ratios are maintained between short and long vowels and stressed syllables are longer. Analyses of intonation show that each content word has a peak at its beginning