Talk:Tübatulabal language

Footnotes and replies

Some footnotes that were placed in the article appear to be more appropriate to the talk page. I'm moving some of them here, and since they are addressed to me or some of my previous edits, I've added responses in italics to the footnotes in bold as well. Footnotes are given with the number they had in the article at the time of removal.

• • • July 12, 2012. Jensen again: Too bad that you didn't keep some cues in the article so that us readers who only encountered your writings after these changes had been made can backtrack to the relevant paragraphs. I am at sea most of the time.

4. This is a weak discussion. For example, the author does not explain whether one counts from left to right, or left to right, a major issue. He needs more details and explanations to convince one that the statement in fact describes the way Tubatulabal works.

I agree. This section should be expanded (as should the whole article). As a general point about the issues raised in these footnotes, when you find something missing from an article, I think it is more useful to 1. add it yourself, or 2. post a note on the talk page suggesting what kind of addition would be most useful, etc. Adding a note like this on the article itself is likely to confuse readers, and it also may take a long time to get noticed by editors (I didn't notice the addition of these notes for several months).

• • • July 12, 2012. Jensen again: First, what was the footnote originally associated with? Wish I knew so that I could understand what is meant here. And too bad you, whoever 'you' are, didn't read Chapter 5 Stress Assignment of the dissertation. It runs from page 144 through 157. It explains that stress is assignment from right to left, alternating mora in predictable environments.

5. See Jensen for discussion of voicing/devoicing and the environments in which each happens. (1973:51 et seq)

Can you elaborate on what that discussion says? Does it agree or disagree with the claims made in the article? Does it just supplement them? Is voicing/devoicing used for grammatical purposes, or is just allophonic? (I don't have a copy of Jensen here at the moment to check this myself.)

• • • July 12, 2012. Jensen again: The Devoicing chapter runs from page 51 through 60 and includes six separate rules. It is probably what you would term a 'phonological' process. Its effect is to devoice voiced consonants in predictable environments. Note the unfortunate fact that Chomsky & Halle's SPE formalism is not adequate to collapse the six rules into one, which is the reality: devoicing is a single process, changing from voiced to voiceless. The fundamental problem is that the phonological features of SPE are not sufficient to describe all applicable environments where it occurs. Oh well. These are the devoicing processes: Voiced Obstruent Devoicing; Final nasal Devoicing; w-Devoicing; Initial Consonant Devoicing; and Final Consonant Devoicing

6. What do "contrastive" and "non-contrastive" mean? Reference please, perhaps a page number from one of the articles cited in the Bibliography?

Those are general linguistic terms, not terms specific to Tubatulabal. The reference is to phonological contrast, i.e. the property that distinguishes phonemes from one another. I'm not sure what the best explanatory wikilink would be, since the article on phonemes doesn't seem to be clearly on point, and there is no article on phonological contrast, which is what is really needed.

8. How does a speaker geminate a glottal stop? Either the vocal folds are closed or they aren't. How can that be 'geminated'?

The concept in question here is phonological gemination, which in principle could be available for any consonant. In terms of phonetics, a geminated glottal stop presumably involves the closure of the vocal folds being maintained for a longer duration than in the case of a simpleton glottal stop. Much like any geminated stop, really.

13. Why use the term "word" when the term "morphophoneme" or "morpheme" are widely understood and used.

Because it's words and not morphemes that are being discussed here. Also, the term 'word' is certainly as widely understood and used as either of those terms.

14. "verbalizing morphology"? What is meant here?

Suffixes that turn a noun or nominal stem into a verb or verbal stem.

15. This is confusing. Are particles not the smallest divisible particles?

No. Morphemes are the indivisible units of morphology. Though in many languages particles might be truly morphologically inert (see Chinese, for example), that isn't the case in Tubatulabal. The name particle is still appropriate because they exhibit dramatically less morphology than either nouns or verbs.

16. How about some examples showing that true particles are inflected in any way?

That would be lovely. I don't have references handy to add them, but it would be great if someone else were to add some examples here.

17. Need definition of "word-formation processes." Jensen's (1973) analysis, following Voegelin (1935), identified 16 "word formation processes (if I understand the meaning of the phrase): Nasal assimilation, Fricative Assimilation, Devoicing, Gemination, Segment Deletion, Glottal Stop Insertion, Metathesis, Elision, Epenthesis, Glide Opening, Laxing, Lengthening, Nasalization and Re-articulation, as well as Primary Stress Assignment and Secondary Stress Assignment.

This section is discussing morphology. The rules that you mention appear to all refer to phonology rather than morphology (again, I don't have Jensen handy at the moment to check for myself). In this case 'word-formation process' has a pretty standard meaning which I would gloss as 'the means or method by which smaller units (morphemes) combine to form words.' (Do you even HAVE Jensen?!?! If you did, you could quickly find and cite the relevant sections. No?)

• • • July 12, 2012: Jensen here. You might be interested to know that when I wrote the dissertation, I toyed a long time with using the term "morphophonemic" here, because it is actually rather difficult to determine at which level in the process of producing an utterance each 'rule' applies. Does the rule apply at the level of (sofar unspecified) morphology or subsequently at the level of the (sofar unpecified) phonological processes, or indeed, at the level of (sofar unspecfied) phonetic output, i.e. the level at which the operation of muscles of phonation work in each language. 71.236.223.35 (talk) 04:14, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

18. What about "pre-fixation"? Does it not occur as well?

Sure, in many languages. In Tubatulabal, the only prefixation that could be claimed to occur are cases of reduplication, which are handled separately. Paucity or absence of prefixation is typical of Uto-Aztecan langauges, and corresponds to a general cross-linguistic tendency for suffixation to occur more often than prefixation.

19. Need explanation for why "?" in these four forms turns into voiceless stops during reduplication.

It goes the other way. The reduplicated forms have an extra syllable created out of the root -- that's the reduplication. In Tubatulabal, reduplicated syllables always begin with glottal stop, and copy the first vowel of the root. This is explained in the preceding paragraph.

20. It is not clear on its face what "compounding" is, particularly since the term is not used by Voegelin(1935) Citations are needed.

Compounding is a standard linguistic term. I've added the appropriate wikilink.

I've also moved all of the following footnotes over here. They essentially all have the form "See Jensen for more on X." What would be very useful would be for someone who has a copy of Jensen's thesis to check out the discussion of these issues, and incorporate it into the article. (**Amen, says Jensen, July 12, 2012.) That can involve removing or replacing any inaccurate information, adding any useful new information, and pointing out discrepancies between authors wherever those are found. I also get the impression here in these questions and responses that the speakers do not fully understand transformational phonology which is a prerequisite to understanding my dissertation.

2. See Jensen for discussion of vowels, their allophones and distribution as determined by a statistical analysis of stress in the vocabulary of Voegelin's "Tubatulabal Texts (1935). (Jensen & 1973:76 & 87).

• • • July 12, 2012. Jensen again: Actually, as set forth in the dissertation, the analysis was done on words in the Texts, Voegelin's Grammar as well as the Working Dictionary of Tubatulabal.

3. That was the working hypothesis of Jensen's 1973 analysis of stress and length in Tubatulabal. It was demonstrated that stress is predictable, assuming that some morphemes have underlying, i.e. lexical, long vowels which count as two moras for the purpose of stress assignment. See page 152 for a demonstration of stress and length in a sentence, in conjunction with 6 other morphophonemic processes. Also see "3.8 Length Alternations" (1973:110 et seq) and "5.0 Stress Assignment" (1973:110;144;152)

• • • July 12, 2012. Jensen again: I wish I knew which paragraph of the article this footnote refer to so that I could understand the meaning of this note.

9. See Jensen for discussion of the derivation of the stress contour of a long utterance. This author says that stress assignment starts on the "final stress of the stem" but this form which he adduces to support that contention has a suffix, hence stress assignment does not start on the last, i.e. the right-most syllable of the string. (Jensen & 1973:76).

• • • July 12, 2012. Jensen again: Someone needs to be careful here. I did not use the phrase "final stress of the stem", nor did Voegelin (who sat on my disseratation committee). Voegelin (1935: 75) said: "...the main stress falls on the final vowel of the stem". Unfortunately, I do not know what paragraph or sentence of the article is referred to by this footnote, so cannot make a better comment than this. I get the impression that the term "author" may refer to EITHER Voegelin or to me?

11. See Jensen for discussion of the derivation of the intonation contour of this phrase within the framework of Transformational Grammar . (Jensen & 1973:151).

12. See Jensen for discussion of the role of glottal stops in Tubatulabal phonology which is more complicated than is suggested by this brief paragraph. (Jensen & 1973:76).

• • • July 12, 2012. Jensen again: The proper citation from my dissertation includes pages 73 through 76, rather than simply page 76.

FYI: I am still alive and kicking and would be happy to answer questions, assuming that I can! Use this email: jrjensen2000@yahoo.com. July 12, 2012. 71.236.223.35 (talk) 04:14, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Jiashudiwanjin (talk) 21:32, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Tubatulabal is a reawakening language

Tubatulabal is not an extinct language, it is alive and still spoken by the current Tubatulabal tribal community, and its language status is classified as "reawakening" based off the 2017-2020 research of the Department of Linguistics at California State University, Long Beach. Source: https://web.csulb.edu/colleges/cla/projects/lingresearch/pahka%27anil/

It is also stated on the existing Wikipedia page on the Tubatulabal under "Language" that the Tubatulabal have a language program that continues to educate members on the language: "Tübatulabal have two dialects "paka'anil" and "bankalachi". Today, in Mountain Mesa, California, the Tübatulabal tribe has a Pakanapul Language Program that teaches the "paka'anil" dialect. The last fluent "paka'anil" dialect speaker was James Andreas, who died in 2009. He lived on the Miranda Allotment, located in Weldon, California. James Andreas spent his last 10 years teaching the Pakanapul Language Team the "paka'anil" dialect. The "bankalachi" dialect is similar to the "paka'anil", however, there is little known about the "bankalachi" dialect."

It is additional recognized as a language currently spoken in the 21st century according to the California Language Archive. Source: https://cla.berkeley.edu/languages/tubatulabal.html 2603:3006:A58:C100:F5C9:6966:780D:F89F (talk) 22:43, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

 Not done this page is not protected, so does not require an edit request. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:04, 14 March 2023 (UTC)