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43-631: The terms Sahaptian (the family) and Sahaptin (the language) have often been confused and used interchangeably in the literature. Sahaptian includes two languages: Nez Perce has two principal dialects, Upper and Lower. Sahaptin has somewhat greater internal diversity, with its main dialects being Umatilla and Yakama . Noel Rude's (2012) classification of Sahaptian is as follows. Work on Proto-Sahaptian reconstruction has been undertaken by Aoki (1962) and Noel Rude (2006, 2012). Proto-Sahaptian consonants: Proto-Sahaptian vowels: Umatilla language Umatilla (Tamalúut or Imatalamłaamí Sɨ́nwit)

86-704: A consonant, even though according to orthographic conventions, an initial glottal stop before a vowel is not written and initial unstressed /ʼɨ/ is not written before /m n l/ plus a consonant. Initial clusters of up to three consonants are allowed ( pccák 'pepper'), medials of up to five consonants and finals of up to four consonants ( látx̣tx̣ 'ashes'). Clusters of identical consonants also occur: qqápni 'silly', ččù 'quiet'. The laryngeals /h ʼ/ usually occur in initial position and sometimes in intervocalic position. As yet, no detailed description of syllable structure in Umatilla Sahaptin has been written. Primary stress

129-721: A n / m e n ) and others the complete disappearance of a vowel (reduction to zero: could n o t → couldn't ). For the study of European languages, one of the most important instances of vowel gradation is the Indo-European ablaut, remnants of which can be seen in the English verbs r i de , r o de , r i dden , or fl y , fl ew , fl ow n . For simply learning English grammar, it is enough to note that these verbs are irregular , but understanding why they have unusual forms that seem irregular (and indeed why they are actually perfectly regular within their own terms) requires an understanding of

172-402: A n , ph o tograph / ph o tography ). Confusingly, in some contexts, the terms 'ablaut', 'vowel gradation', 'apophony' and 'vowel alternation' are used synonymously, especially in synchronic comparisons, but historical linguists prefer to keep 'ablaut' for the specific Indo-European phenomenon, which is the meaning intended by the linguists who first coined the word. In Proto-Indo-European,

215-548: A single vowel in the parent language. In particular, the zero grade was often subject to modification from changes in the pronunciation of syllabic sonorants. For example, in Germanic, syllabic sonorants acquired an epenthetic -u- , thus converting the original zero grade to a new "u-grade" in many words. Thus, while ablaut survives in some form in all Indo-European languages, it became progressively less systematic over time. Ablaut explains vowel differences between related words of

258-467: A technical alphabet based upon the Americanist phonetic notation to transcribe Umatilla, though other practical orthographies also exist. All long vowels are written as clusters of identical short vowels. Vowels of different quality never appear in clusters. Allowed diphthongs are the following: /ay aay aw aaw iw iiw uy uuy/. Consonant clusters are common and show few restrictions. All words begin with

301-401: A verb is *bʰeydʰ- "to wait" (cf. "bide"). In the daughter languages, these came to be important markers of grammatical distinctions. The vowel change in the Germanic strong verb, for example, is the direct descendant of that seen in the Indo-European verb paradigm. Examples in modern English are the following: It was in this context of Germanic verbs that ablaut was first described, and this

344-749: Is a variety of Southern Sahaptin , part of the Sahaptian subfamily of the Plateau Penutian group. It was spoken during late aboriginal times along the Columbia River and is therefore also called Columbia River Sahaptin. It is currently spoken as a first language by a few dozen elders and some adults in the Umatilla Reservation in Oregon. Some sources say that Umatilla is derived from imatilám-hlama : hlama means 'those living at' or 'people of' and there

387-570: Is an ongoing debate about the meaning of imatilám , but it is said to be an island in the Columbia River. B. Rigsby and N. Rude mention the village of ímatalam that was situated at the mouth of the Umatilla River and where the language was spoken. The Umatillas pronounce the word ímatalam . A Umatilla person is called imatalamłá (with orthographic ł representing IPA /ɬ/ ) and the Umatilla people are called imatalamłáma . The Nez Perce refer to

430-568: Is distinctive and is indicated by an acute accent. It occurs on one syllable of a word. Stress contrast can be seen in the following examples: ámapa husband. OBJ     amápa island. LOC ámapa {} amápa husband. OBJ {} island.LOC páqʼinušana he saw him     paqʼínušana they saw (him) páqʼinušana {} paqʼínušana {he saw him} {} {they saw (him)} Nondistinctive secondary and lesser stresses occur phonetically and are conditioned by phonetic and syntactic environments. Alternation in

473-562: Is easily explained: the PIE root is *h 1 es- . In the singular, the stem is stressed, so it remains in the e-grade, and it takes the inflection -ti . In the plural, however, the inflection -énti was stressed, causing the stem to reduce to the zero grade: *h 1 es-énti → *h 1 s-énti . See main article: Indo-European copula . Some of the morphological functions of the various grades are as follows: e-grade: o-grade: zero-grade: lengthened grade: Many examples of lengthened-grade roots in

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516-466: Is not difficult to imagine it as a contraction of an older *ph 2 terés, pronounced perhaps [pɐterés] , as this combination of consonants and vowels would be possible in English as well. In other cases, however, the absence of a vowel strikes the speaker of a modern western European language as unpronounceable. To understand, one must be aware that there were a number of sounds that were consonants in principle but could operate in ways analogous to vowels:

559-408: Is said to be from pre-Proto-Indo-European syncope in unaccented syllables, but in some cases the lack of accent does not cause zero grade: *deywó- , nominative plural *-es "god". There does not seem to be a rule governing the unaccented syllables that take zero grade and the ones that take stronger grades. It is still a matter of debate whether PIE had an original a-vowel at all. In later PIE,

602-400: Is said to be in the "zero grade". Syllables with long vowels are said to be in "lengthened grade". (When the e -grade or the o -grade is referred to, the short vowel forms are meant.) A classic example of the five grades of ablaut in a single root is provided by the different case forms of two closely related Greek words. In the following table, an acute accent (´) marks the syllable carrying

645-467: Is still what most people primarily associate with the phenomenon. A fuller description of ablaut operating in English, German and Dutch verbs and of the historical factors governing these can be found at the article Germanic strong verb . The same phenomenon is displayed in the verb tables of Latin , Ancient Greek and Sanskrit . Examples of ablaut as a grammatical marker in Latin are the vowel changes in

688-434: Is synthetic to mildly polysynthetic. The processes used are clisis, reduplication, ablaut, compounding, suppletion, order and the most common one is affixation (suffixation in particular). Nouns, adjectives and pronouns inflect for number and case. There are three number categories: singular, dual and plural. The singular is not marked. The dual is marked by the suffix -in (with allomorphs -win , -yn or -n depending on

731-538: The Gothic and Dutch languages", 1710). The term ablaut is borrowed from German, and derives from the noun Laut "sound", and the prefix ab- , which indicates movement downwards or away, or deviation from a norm; thus the literal meaning is "sound reduction". It was coined in this sense in 1819 by the German linguist Jacob Grimm in his Deutsche Grammatik , though the word had been used before him. In particular,

774-555: The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb s i ng, s a ng, s u ng and its related noun s o ng , a paradigm inherited directly from the Proto-Indo-European stage of the language. Traces of ablaut are found in all modern Indo-European languages , though its prevalence varies greatly. The phenomenon of Indo-European ablaut was first recorded by Sanskrit grammarians in

817-532: The 17th-century grammarian Schottelius had used the word negatively to suggest that German verbs lacked the sophistication of the classics, but there is no hint of this disdain in Grimm or in modern scholarly usage. In English, the term became established through the 1845 translation of Bopp's Comparative Grammar . Vowel gradation is any vowel difference between two related words (such as ph o tograph [ˈf əʊ təgrɑːf] and ph o tography [f ə ˈtɒgrəfi]) or two forms of

860-645: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. In 2015, Umatilla instruction will be given at the high school level. There is interest in adapting a curriculum for Umatilla that has been used successfully for Okanagan Salish at the Salish School of Spokane. The Umatilla Dictionary was published in 2014 with the University of Washington Press. The Dictionary documents the language of

903-483: The Umatilla language in its linguistic and historical context and compiles all of its known words, phrases, and constructions. Umatilla Dictionary is an important work for people of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Yakama Nation, and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and adds to the growing linguistic work being done by tribes and scholars on endangered languages. Rigsby and Rude use

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946-518: The Umatilla people as hiyówatalampoo . See Aoki (1994:171). As of 2013, there are about 50 first language speakers of Umatilla. The language is taught at the Nixyaawii Community School. "There are six full-time language instructors in CTUIR ( Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation ). Nixyaawii Community School has offered Umatilla, Walla Walla and Nez Perce language classes for

989-543: The Umatilla people east of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon and Washington. Working for many years with the accumulated scholarship of linguists and anthropologists as well as with elders on the Umatilla Reservation, tribal linguist Noel Rude has painstakingly recorded words, pronunciations, phrases, and other elements of the Umatilla language. The dictionary includes a grammar and comparative information that places

1032-404: The basic, inherent vowel of most syllables was a short e . Ablaut is the name of the process whereby this short e changed, becoming short o , long ē , long ō or sometimes disappearing entirely to leave no vowel at all. Thus, ablaut results in the alternation of the following sounds: If a syllable had a short e , it is said to be in the "e-grade" or "full grade". When it had no vowel, it

1075-406: The development in the daughter languages is frequently far more complicated, and few reflect the original system as neatly as Greek. Various factors, such as vowel harmony , assimilation with nasals, or the effect of the presence of laryngeals in the Indo-European (IE) roots as well as their subsequent loss in most daughter languages, mean that a language may have several different vowels representing

1118-410: The disappearance of the laryngeal h 2 could leave an a-colouring and this may explain all occurrences of a in later PIE. However, some argue controversially that the e-grade could sometimes be replaced by an a-grade without the influence of a laryngeal, which might help to explain the vowels in class 6 Germanic verbs , for example. Although PIE had only this one, basically regular, ablaut sequence,

1161-483: The examples above, Szemerényi's law affected the older sequences *ph 2 -tér-s and *n̥-péh 2 -tor-s, changing them to *ph 2 -tḗr and *n̥-péh 2 -tōr. Thus, these forms were originally in the regular, unlengthened e-grade and o-grade. Such lengthened vowels were, however, later grammaticalised and spread to other words in which the change did not occur. Nevertheless, there are examples of true lengthened grades, in which short e alternates with long ē . Examples are

1204-423: The final). There are two main ways to mark the plural: with the suffix -ma ( tílaaki-ma 'women") and by full or partial reduplication ( pšwá 'stone', pšwápšwa 'stones'). These two markers can sometimes co-exist in the same word. Several nouns feature irregular plural marks that might have been more widely used in the past, such as the prefix a- and the suffix -tu . Verbs have the most complex morphology of all

1247-405: The four syllabic sonorants, the three laryngeals and the two semi-vowels: When u and i came in postvocalic positions, the result was a diphthong. Ablaut is nevertheless regular and looks like this: Thus, any of these could replace the ablaut vowel when it was reduced to the zero-grade: the pattern CVrC (for example, *bʰergʰ- ) could become CrC ( *bʰr̥gʰ- ). However, not every PIE syllable

1290-406: The grammar of the reconstructed proto-language . Ablaut is the oldest and most extensive single source of vowel gradation in the Indo-European languages and must be distinguished clearly from other forms of gradation, which developed later, such as Germanic umlaut ( m a n / m e n , g oo se / g ee se , l o ng / l e ngth ) or the results of modern English word-stress patterns ( m a n / wom

1333-402: The language started to develop a more complex vowel system. Thus, it has often been speculated that an original e-grade underwent two changes in some phonetic environments: under certain circumstances, it changed to o (the o-grade) and in others, it disappeared entirely (the zero-grade). However, that is not certain: the phonetic conditions that controlled ablaut have never been determined, and

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1376-622: The last decade and a Cay-Uma-Wa Head Start program is being developed to reach children while they’re young. There are also online video resources and the Tamaluut immersion school, a new language immersion program for three- to five-year-olds." The Wíyat'ish Naknúwit "For the Future" Language Project, has trained speakers using a Master-Apprentice program. A Flash Story Camp has been held by First Nations Development in collaboration with Tamastslikt's Language Enhancement Program and Education Department, and

1419-560: The later Vedic period (roughly 8th century BCE), and was codified by Pāṇini in his Aṣṭādhyāyī (4th century BCE), where the terms guṇa and vṛddhi were used to describe the phenomena now known respectively as the full grade and lengthened grade . In the context of European languages, the phenomenon was first described in the early 18th century by the Dutch linguist Lambert ten Kate , in his book Gemeenschap tussen de Gottische spraeke en de Nederduytsche ("Common aspects of

1462-403: The paradigms of verbs and nouns. These were not the main markers of grammatical form, since the inflection system served this purpose, but they must have been significant secondary markers. An example of ablaut in the paradigm of the noun in PIE can be found in *pértus , from which the English words ford and (via Latin) port are derived (both via the zero-grade stem *pr̥t- ). An example in

1505-494: The parts of speech. Their internal structure is characterized by three major positions: Umatilla, like other varieties of Sahaptin, is characterized by a free word order and a complex case-marking system. Ablaut In linguistics , the Indo-European ablaut ( / ˈ æ b l aʊ t / AB -lowt , from German Ablaut pronounced [ˈaplaʊt] ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in

1548-479: The perfect stem of verbs. Ablaut can often explain apparently random irregularities. For example, the verb "to be" in Latin has the forms est (he is) and sunt (they are). The equivalent forms in German are very similar: ist and sind . The same forms were present in Proto-Slavic : *estь and *sǫtь , and developed into e.g. Polish jest and są . The difference between singular and plural in these languages

1591-468: The phonetic shapes of morphemes is frequent and most often vocalic. Vocalic alternations result from processes ( ablaut , epenthesis and truncation) that can be morphologically or phonologically conditioned. Consonantal alternations arise from two processes: velar stops /k kʼ/ may palatalize to /c č/ and affricates /c č/ become /t/ before /s š/. For instance, /c/ + /š/ becomes /t/ + /š/. The morphological structure of Umatilla and other Sahaptin dialects

1634-533: The position of the word stress may not have been a key factor at all. There are many counterexamples to the proposed rules: *deywós and its nominative plural *deywóes show pretonic and posttonic e-grade, respectively, and *wĺ̥kʷos has an accented zero grade. Many examples of lengthened grades, including those listed above, are not directly conditioned by ablaut. Instead, they are a result of sound changes like Szemerényi's law and Stang's law , which caused compensatory lengthening of originally short vowels. In

1677-533: The same language. For example: Ablaut also explains vowel differences between cognates in different languages. For the English-speaking non-specialist, a good reference work for quick information on IE roots, including the difference of ablaut grade behind related lexemes, is Watkins (2000). (Note that in discussions of lexis, Indo-European roots are normally cited in the e-grade, without any inflections.) In PIE, there were already ablaut differences within

1720-436: The same word (such as m a n and m e n ). The difference does not need to be indicated in the spelling. There are many kinds of vowel gradation in English and other languages, which are discussed generally in the article apophony . Some involve a variation in vowel length (quantitative gradation: ph o tograph / ph o tography shows reduction of the first vowel to a schwa ), others in vowel coloring (qualitative gradation: m

1763-482: The verbs with "Narten" inflection , and nouns like *mḗh₁-n̥s "moon", genitive *méh₁-n̥s-os . Alternations of this type were rare, however, and the e ~ o ~ ∅ alternation was the most common by far. The long ō grade was rarer still and may not have actually been a part of the ablaut system at all. The zero grade of ablaut may appear difficult for speakers of English. In the case of *ph 2 trés, which may already have been pronounced something like [pɐtrés] , it

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1806-458: The word stress; a macron (¯) marks long vowels and the syllable in bold is the one illustrating the different vowel gradations. In this unusually neat example, the following can be seen: As with most reconstructions, however, scholars differ about the details of this example. One way to think of this system is to suppose that Proto-Indo-European originally had only one vowel, short e , and over time, it changed according to phonetic context, so

1849-403: Was capable of forming a zero grade; some consonant structures inhibited it in particular cases, or completely. Thus, for example, although the preterite plural of a Germanic strong verb (see below) is derived from the zero grade, classes 4 and 5 have instead vowels representing the lengthened e-grade, as the stems of these verbs could not have sustained a zero grade in this position. Zero grade

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