Orthography

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Written Paiute is not governed by an authoritative standards body, and as such, the orthography used by local communities and scholars to represent the language varies. I see these standards as falling into three major groups:

  • Linguistic orthographies that sacrifice aesthetics in order to faithfully transcribe the sounds recorded in fieldwork. These are common in Paiute grammars produced as doctoral theses, and in the usages examples within entries in the Northern Paiute-Bannock Dictionary.
  • Standard (for lack of a better term) orthography represents Paiute in a way that broadly aligns with the majority of languages using the Roman alphabet.
  • Wycliffe orthography is designed to be convenient for English speakers, using only ASCII characters and vowel representations that match English orthography following the Great Vowel Shift.

Pyramid Lake has standardized on the Wycliffe system, and the course material represented in this site is provided in Wycliffe. I find a "standard" orthography to be most convenient for my own reading and for referencing the dictionary, so I primarily use such a system on this site, supplementing with Wycliffe where able.

My "standard" orthography diverges slightly from some others for the sake of convenience and typographic aesthetics. This is most obvious in the representation of phonemes like kw, ng and ts with a single glyph, as I find it helpful to avoid digraphs.

This site NP-B NPLP Wycliffe IPA Notes
a a a a [a]
âi ai ai ae [e] Pyramid Lake features an [e] where other dialects have [ai], and its Wycliffe system reflects that with ae. I use a circumflex as a mnemonic to remember to pronounce [e] without diverging from dictionary spelling.
b b b b [b], [β]
d d d d [d], [ɾ]
dz dz dz tz [dz] The difference between dz and z is a little murky, at least in Pyramid Lake dialect, which tends to represent both as tz in Wycliffe. I generally follow the NP-B spelling while pronouncing words as heard spoken.
g g g g [g], [ɣ]
ģ gw gw gw [gʷ], [ɣʷ]
h h h h [h], [χ]
ʻ ʔ ' ' [ʔ] I use a "modifier letter turned comma" character like the Hawaiian ʻokina because the typography is aesthetically pleasing, and it avoids glottal stops being misidentified as word boundaries by software when working with text on a computer.
i i i e [i]
ii ii ii e, ee [i:]
k k k k [k], [x]
ķ kw kw kw [kʷ]
m m m m [m]
mm mm mm mm [m:]
n n n n [n:]
ŋ ng ng ng [ŋ] Pronouncing ng as [ŋg] instead of [ŋ] is a common error for English speakers!
o o o o [ɔ], [o]
oo oo oo o [ɔ:], [o:]
p p p p [p]
s s s s [s], [ʃ] (following [i])
ss ss ss s [s:], [ʃ:]
t t t t [t]
c ts ts ts, tz [ts] NP-B example transcriptions have c for [ts], but the entry heading orthography is ts.
ç ch dd dy [tʃ]
u u u oo [u] In Wycliffe, [uʔu] (at least word-finally) is represented as oo'o.
uu u u oo [u:] Difficulty representing [u:] is a weakness of Wycliffe.
ü ɨ ü u [ɨ] I was tempted to use ı, but it would require retooling capital letters and may look odd or confuse people. NPLP "linguistic orthography" and some other sources use ü for this phoneme, so it is not without precedent.
üü ɨɨ üü u [ɨ:]
w w w w [w]
y y y y [j]
z z z tz [z] Tends to sound the same as dz or Wycliffe tz in Pyramid Lake dialect.