10. Lakota kh, ph, th (aspirated stops)
Posted: February 11th, 2009, 2:59 amStops with soft aspiration (NLD, page 697 1st edn, page 751 2nd edn)
It was said in the previous chapter that PLAIN STOPS (k, p, t) are the most frequent kind of stops in Lakota and that students whose first language is English have to learn how to de-aspirate their k, p, t.
The Lakota language actually has aspirated stops as well, but they are much less frequent that un-aspirated stops. In any given Lakota text they constitute only about 7% of all stop sounds (compare with 80% for plain stops).
When Lakota stops are aspirated the aspiration has to be marked. For this the letter h is used. For the sake of orthography, aspirated stops can be approximated in the following way:
kh sounds like k_h in back_home when pronounced fast
ph sounds like p_h in steep_hill when pronounced fast
th sounds like t_h in sit_here when pronounced fast
As already explained, these stops are actually identical with English aspirated stops, as in kill, pill, till (phonetically transcribed as khill, phill, thill). As such they do not represent any challenge for an English-speaking student. The main difficulty is to recognize them in the written form (kh, ph, th) and not confuse them with the much more frequent plain stops (k, p, t).
Examples of words with this type of stop are
khéyA turtle
khuwá to pursue smth/sb
íphi to be full (of food)
philámayaye thank you
thí to live (in a place)
thípi house
It was said in the previous chapter that PLAIN STOPS (k, p, t) are the most frequent kind of stops in Lakota and that students whose first language is English have to learn how to de-aspirate their k, p, t.
The Lakota language actually has aspirated stops as well, but they are much less frequent that un-aspirated stops. In any given Lakota text they constitute only about 7% of all stop sounds (compare with 80% for plain stops).
When Lakota stops are aspirated the aspiration has to be marked. For this the letter h is used. For the sake of orthography, aspirated stops can be approximated in the following way:
kh sounds like k_h in back_home when pronounced fast
ph sounds like p_h in steep_hill when pronounced fast
th sounds like t_h in sit_here when pronounced fast
As already explained, these stops are actually identical with English aspirated stops, as in kill, pill, till (phonetically transcribed as khill, phill, thill). As such they do not represent any challenge for an English-speaking student. The main difficulty is to recognize them in the written form (kh, ph, th) and not confuse them with the much more frequent plain stops (k, p, t).
Examples of words with this type of stop are
khéyA turtle
khuwá to pursue smth/sb
íphi to be full (of food)
philámayaye thank you
thí to live (in a place)
thípi house