Choctaw

Last Updated: 2020-06-26

SLIGHLTY COMPROMISED: alphabet is ambiguously phonetic with nasal vowels; conflation between /n/ and /m/

Background

Language Family: Muskogean / Western

• Choctaw is a Native American language spoken in the southeastern United States (Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee).

Phonology

Consonants

• Ulrich (1986) argues for /ʂ/ instead of /ʃ/ (p. 7).

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p b	t			k	ʔ
Affricates			tʃ
Fricatives	f	s ɬ	ʃ			h
Nasals	m	n
Approximants	w	l		j
Note: Phonemes to the right of a cell are voiced (in the stop row) or lateral (in the fricative row).

Vowels

• Vowel length is contrastive in Choctaw (Broadwell 2005, 16–17). Long vowels are indicated by duplicate graphemes.
• Nasal vowels might have originated as allophonic in /VN/ clusters (Broadwell 2005, 17); Nicklas (1975) and Ulrich (1986) seem to bolster this view (pp. 237-8; pp. 8, 60). Between this and the relatively rare usage of their unique characters, I have decided to treat the nasal vowels as allophonic and exclude them from the ruleset.
  • Nasal vowels arise word-finally from /Vn/ sequences.
  • Nasal vowels arise word-initially and word-medially from /VnC/ or /VmC/ sequences.
  • Given the alphabet is phonetic in the sense that nasal vowels are represented, there is some ambiguity in terms of what nasal to transcribe following the vowel. I have opted for /n/, just to be consistent, but this does mean the language is compromised to some extent.
  • Length is not contrastive in nasal vowels, but they are most commonly realized as long (Ulrich 1986, 8). Long vowels are indicated by repeated graphemes.
• In short closed syllables, the vowels tend to be produced more laxly, being realized closer to [ɪ], [ʌ~ə], and [ʊ] (Ulrich 1986, 8; Broadwell 2005, 17).

	Front	Central	Back
High	i
Mid			o
Low		a

Tone

• A pitch accent exists in Choctaw, but there are virtually no minimal pairs that differ wholly on tone, so I currently intend to proceed with the language without marking tones (Broadwell 2005, 17).
• Tones are sometimes attested orthographically on nonfinal syllables (Broadwell 2005, 6, 17), but this seems to be an academic notation that is not commonly used by actual speakers.
• Pitch accent, when marked, is marked with an acute accent (´) (Broadwell 2005, 6).

Alphabet

• The alphabet I am using is the Modified Traditional orthography (sometimes called the modern linguistic variant), which is used by most contemporary linguists (Broadwell 2005, 6) as well as by Crúbadán. The ruleset will also support the Mississippi Choctaw orthography, which is also popularly used today, but it will not support the Traditional orthography since the Traditional orthography does not distinguish vowel length (Broadwell 2005, 4).
• ⟨’⟩ seems to be mostly attested in academic sources rather than used by speakers, but I have included it in the ruleset so that it can be incorporated if necessary.
• Within the Mississippi orthography, nasalized vowels are marked with hooks: ⟨a̧, i̧, o̧⟩.
• ⟨r⟩ appears periodically in the Crúbadán corpus but does not appear to correspond to any actual Choctaw phonemes.
• When /l/ is followed by /h/, the cluster is written as ⟨l.h⟩ to distinguish from /ɬ/ (Broadwell 2005, 16). This sequence is exceedingly rare though, with sources disagreeing on whether it natively occurs at all; therefore I have not included it in the ruleset.

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/a/
a̲	/an/
b	/b/
f	/f/
h	/h/
i	/i/
i̲	/in/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/
o̲	/on/
p	/p/
s	/s/
t	/t/
w	/w/
y	/j/
’	/ʔ/	rare
Digraph
ch	/tʃ/
lh	/ɬ/
sh	/ʃ/
Mississippi orthography		exceptions to the Modified Traditional
č	/tʃ/
ł	/ɬ/
š	/ʃ/
Other supported symbols
c	/k/
e	/i/
u	/o/
v	/a/

Syllable Structure

• Syllables in Choctaw fall under three different categories (Ulrich 1986, 12):
  • Light syllables: (C)V
    
  • Heavy syllables: (C)VV, (C)V[+nasal], (C)VC
    
  • Superheavy syllables: (C)VVC, (C)V[+nasal]C

Lenition Rules

• For some speakers, /k/ spirantizes to [ɣ] (Broadwell 2005, 15).
• When followed by a “stem consonant” (an obstruent?), nasal clusters reduce to the final sound in the cluster (Nicklas 1975, 242).
• /j/ deletes before /l/; /w/ does likewise if preceded by a high back vowel (Nicklas 1975, 243).
• /ɬ/ debuccalizes to [h] when followed by a fricative or affricate (Nicklas 1975, 243).
• /l/ spirantizes to [ɬ] before a voiceless consonant (Nicklas 1975, 243).

Misc. Rules

• All consonants (except /ʔ/) can occur as geminates, in which case they are just written by doubling their character (Ulrich 1986, 8).
• Some younger speakers produce /ɬ/ as [θ] (Broadwell 2005, 16).
• When /k/ or /h/ is followed by a voiced consonant, an epenthetic vowel (closest to [ə] in realization) is inserted between the two sounds (Broadwell 2005, 16).
• /h/ sometimes assimilates to [ç] when preceding /tʃ/ (Broadwell 2005, 16).
• /ʔ/ does not appear word-initially (Broadwell 2005, 19).
• The following consonants cannot be word-final: /b ɬ w j tʃ/ (Broadwell 2005, 19).
• Some speakers render words with a /CVCVCV/ form as /CVCVːCV/ (Broadwell 2005, 24).
• Along morpheme boundaries, vowels delete if followed by another vowel (Broadwell 2005, 26).
• [ʔ] is inserted at the end of vowel-final words (Ulrich 1986, 14–15).
• Long vowels shorten when followed by /hC/ or /lC/ (Nicklas 1975, 242).
• /l/ fully assimilates to preceding labial consonants, except /p/ (Nicklas 1975, 243).
• /l/ fully assimilates to preceding /ɬ/ or following /n/ (Nicklas 1975, 243).

References

Broadwell, George Aaron. 2005. A Choctaw Reference Grammar. University of Nebraska Press.

Nicklas, Thurston Dale. 1975. “Choctaw Morphophonemics.” In Studies in Southeastern Indian Languages, edited by James M. Crawford, 237–49. University of Georgia Press.

Ulrich, Charles Howard. 1986. “Choctaw Morphophonology.” PhD thesis, University of California, Los Angeles.