Arapaho language

Arapaho
Hinóno'eitíít
Spoken in	United States
Region	Wind River Indian Reservation, Wyoming; Oklahoma
Native speakers	~1,000  (date missing)
Language family	Algic Algonquian Arapahoan Arapaho
Language codes
ISO 639-2	arp
ISO 639-3	arp

The Arapaho language or hinono'eitiit (also "Arapahoe Language" and hiinonoei'tiit) is a Plains Algonquian language (an areal rather than genetic grouping) spoken almost entirely by elders in Wyoming, and to a much lesser extent in Oklahoma. It is in great danger of becoming extinct. As of 1996, there were approximately 1,000 speakers of the Northern Arapaho. In 2008, it was reported that a school had been opened to teach the language to children. 22 children are currently being taught there. The school was established as a matter of urgency, as no person aged under 55 was fluent in Arapaho at that point.

Arapaho has diverged very significantly phonologically from its posited proto-language, Proto-Algonquian (Proto-Algonquian *maθkwa "bear" became Arapaho wox, and Proto-Algonquian *weθari "her husband" became Arapaho ííx).

Phonology

As mentioned above, Arapaho is phonologically very distinct from Proto-Algonquian and other Algonquian languages, and even from languages spoken in the adjacent Great Basin.

More Examples of Arapaho shift from Proto-Algonquian

Arapaho	Wampanoag	Translation
tóó'owún	taːkamiːyan	'you hit me'
nétʃ	nəpiː	'water'
bétee	mətaːh	'heart'
hinénn	nən	'man'
hó'	aːkiː	'dirt','land'
tʃeeb-	pəm-	'along' (perlative, preverb)of Language'

Using Wampanoag, which has generally been among the more conservative Proto-Algonquian languages, in order to exemplify the shift Arapaho has undergone a few contrasts will be noted. The Arapaho phoneme /tʃ/ for the voiceless palato-alveolar affricate sometimes referred to as the symbol /c/ corresponds to the morpheme /p/ in the Wampanoag. Likewise, the voiceless glottal stop /ʔ/ sometimes, as here, noted by the symbol /'/ corresponds to /k/ and the Arapaho /b/ to the Wampanoag /m/. According to Kennteth Lock Hale from the department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT and co-author of The Green Book of Language, Arapaho distinguishes itself as far as language evolution by holding onto the consonant sound /θ/ (sometimes referred to as /3/ in the Arapaho writing system) while other Proto-Algonquian languages shifted to the use of /n/ and others still use /l,y,r,t/.

Vowels

Arapaho has a series of four short vowels /ɪ ɛ ɔ ʊ/ and four long vowels /iː ɛː ɔː uː/. In fact, /i/ and /u/ are practically allophones of a single phoneme, as, with very few exceptions, the former does not occur after velar consonants, and the latter only occurs after them. However /ʒ/ does occur prior to /u/ but in underlying form only with the surface form of /x/. /u/ does have some exceptions as in the free variants kokíy/kokúy in which both mean 'gun', kookiyón/kookuyón which means 'for no reason', bíí'oxíyoo/bíí'oxúyoo which means 'Found in the Grass' (a mythological creature). There are no minimal pairs to discuss the contrast in distribution except núhu' which means 'this' versus níhi which has no meaning on its own as it occurs only in bound form.

Vowel Location

	Front	Central	Back
High	ɪ		ʊ
Mid	ɛ		ɔ
Low

It also contains three diphthongs, /ei/, /ɔu/, and /ie/ and several tripthongs /eii oee ouu/ as well as extended sequences of vowels such as /eee/ with stress on either the first or the last vowel in the combination. Almost uniquely among the world's languages, it has no low vowels, such as /a/. The lengthening of Arapaho's four vowel sounds changes the meaning of the word entirely. In order to demonstrate here are some examples of minimal pairs: hísi’ meaning tick with híːsi’ meaning day and hócoo meaning steak with hóːcoo meaning devil. Arapaho has no vowel initial words so in the context where a vowel would be realized in a word initial position an /h/ is added.

Consonants

The consonant inventory of Arapaho is given in the table below. /j/ is normally transcribed as <y>, /tʃ/ as <c>, /ʔ/ as <'>, and /θ/ is sometimes written <3>.

	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal			n
Stop	b		t	tʃ	k	ʔ
Fricative		θ	s		x	h
Approximant				j	w

Consonant Clusters

The only predictable consonant cluster in Arapaho is /hC/ as it is a;so the only underlying phoneme. This cluster is the only one that occurs on its own and not as a result of vowel syncope or inter morphemic combination. No word clusters occur initially and /hC/ is the only one that occurs in a word final position. There are no word clusters in Arapaho that are more than two phonemes in length.

Allophony

The phoneme /b/ (the voiced bilabial stop) has a voiceless allophone /p/ that occurs in a preconsonantal or word final position. The phonemes /c/, /k/, and /t/ are normally unaspirated but become aspirated in a preconsonantal and final environment or when in a syllable initial position with /h/ as the final phoneme separated by a short vowel such as /i/ in the following examples where cih (a directional word meaning towards the speaker ) turns to cʰih and tih (which means when or since ) to tʰih. Also in this environment /b/ is aspirated and voiceless almost to the /p/ sound as in the example héétb̥ʰih'ínkúútiinoo ("I will turn out the lights") where the b would be realized as devoiced and aspirated to the point of /p/.

Prosody

Arapaho is a tonal language. Vowels can have a mid tone (unmarked), high tone (marked with an acute accent), or falling tone (marked with a circumflex). According to Cowell and Moss, the pitch of Arapaho does ewist but it is hard to hear by a non native speaker and native speakers are not always able to distinguish where and when it does occur but can produce the sound on a regular basis without direct forethought. Dipthongs can be marked with a falling pitch that has some times been attributed to the overall pitch of the morpheme in which the diphthong is included. Pitch accents can be considered as contrastive with the following minimal pairs as examples: tecénoo meaning 'door' with técenoo meaning 'roll it out' and hónoosóó meaning 'it is fancy' and honoosóó meaning 'it is raining. Although according to the data analyzed by Cowell and Moss there is not enough sufficient evidence to suggest that pitch can determine vowel meaning. The minimal pairs, such as those listed above, are rare and do not occur in such high frequency as in other tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese.

Gros Ventre

Gros Ventre (also known as Atsina), a divergent dialect of Arapaho or closely related language, has three additional phonemes, /tʲ/, /ts/, and /bʲ/, and lacks the velar fricative /x/.

Other Dialects

Nawathinehena was another language of the Arapahoan group, with a phonological development quite different from either Gros Ventre or Arapaho proper. It has been identified as the former language of the Southern Arapaho, who switched to speaking Arapaho proper in the 19th century. However, the language is not well attested, being documented only in a vocabulary collected in 1899 by Alfred L. Kroeber from the Oklahoma Arapaho. Among its divergent features is the appearance of Proto-Algonquian */s/ as /t/.

Besawunena, also only attested from a wordlist collected by Kroeber, differs only slightly from Arapaho, but a few of its sound changes resemble those seen in Gros Ventre. It had speakers among the Northern Arapaho as recently as the late 1920s.

References

• Conathon, Lisa. Accessed on 11/3/2011. Arapaho-English Dictionary. http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~arapaho/arapaho_english.html#N
• Cowell, Andrew, and Moss, Alonzo, Sr. 2008. The Arapaho Language. University Press of Colorado.
• Goddard, Ives. 1974. "An Outline of the Historical Phonology of Arapaho and Atsina." International Journal of American Linguistics 40:102-16.
• Goddard, Ives. 2001. "The Algonquian Languages of the Plains". Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 13: 71-79. Washington: the Smithsonian Institution.
• Mithun, Marianne. 1999. The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Picard, Marc. 1994. Principles and Methods in Historical Phonology: From Proto-Algonkian to Arapaho. Montreal and Kingston: McGill—Queen's University Press.
• Salzman, Zdenek and The Northern Arapaho Tribe and Anderson, Jeffrey. 1998. Dictionary of Northern Arapaho Language. http://www.colorado.edu/csilw/arapahoproject/language/dictionary/dic_frame2.html

External links

• Arapaho language at Ethnologue (16th ed., 2009)
• Entry for Arapaho at Rosetta Project
• The Arapaho Language
• Arapaho Language Archives, with many dialogues and narratives in Arapaho with glosses
• Nun-na-a-in-ah Ve-vith-ha Hin-nen-nau Hin-nen-it-dah-need (1895) Portions of the Book of Common Prayer in Arapaho