Article

Name: The Writing System Project for the Threatened Unwritten Chalkan Language

Authors: Natalya N. Fedina, Timofey V. Тimkin

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

Abstract:

The paper deals with the cases of the graphical variability in the Chalkan language and suggests some proposal for optimization of the Chalkan orthography. The Chalkan language has no established graphical system. Native speakers use Russian and Altay letters to write in Chalkan but it can’t reflect specific phonemes properly. It leads to the occurrence of several graphical variants that capture the pronunciation incorrectly. The material of the article is published and handwritten dictionaries written by native speakers. On the base of graphical analysis cases of high graphical variability are established. For these cases the audio recording was made and processed by means of spectral analysis and glottography via Praat software. The project of the Chalkan orthography improvement was made.

For example central mid vowel [ə] is denoted by letter a, but we propose for it a special sign ə. We observe the variability и / ы in the suffixes and propose using the letter ы. The palatal nasal consonant can be denoted by signs н, нь, ӈ or њ, but we suggest writing њ. The velar nasal consonant tends to be written as ң or ҥ and we advice to use ҥ. For the palatal plosive consonant which can be written as j or ть and we propose using j there. We suggest using letter қ for uvular plosive [q]. For velar approximant speakers use letters ғ, ӷ, or х and we choose ғ as the best variant. For alveolar-postalveolar voiced fricative consonant graphemes ж, щ, ч или жь are used and in our opinion the new letter җ should be introduced.

So we suppose that the Chalkan alphabet should include letters Аа Бб Вв Гг ғ Дд Jj Ее ǝ Жж җ Зз Ии Йй Кк Ққ Лл Мм Нн Њњ Ҥҥ Оо Öö Пп Рр Сс Тт Уу Ӱӱ Фф Хх Цц Чч Шш Щщ Ыы ь ъ Ээ Юю Яя where letters ч, ь, ъ, ю, я are only for Russian borrowing.

Keywords: Chalkan language, non-written language, writing, experimental phonetics, grapheme, spelling

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