Southern Pomo language

Southern Pomo is one of seven mutually unintelligible Pomo languages which were formerly spoken in Northern California along the Russian River and Clear Lake. The Pomo languages have been grouped together with other so-called Hokan languages. Southern Pomo is unique among the Pomo languages in preserving, perhaps, the greatest number of syllables inherited from Proto-Pomo (the ancestral language from which all seven Pomo languages descend).

The Speakers

The speakers of Southern Pomo were never a unified polical group; rather, they were spread across a number of villages and spoke slightly different dialects. Southern Pomo speakers did not have a name for their language or themselves. As the southernmost of the Pomo, the speakers of the language were the first to suffer the ravages of Mexican and, later, European-American invasion. Southern Pomo speakers were used by the Mexicans to construct the last of the California missions. The damage done during the Mexican period was compounded by the European-Americans. Only the northernmost populations of Southern Pomo speakers, those of the Dry Creek and Cloverdale dialects, survived to be recorded by the time linguists began to collect data on the language.

At least four modern rancherias (the California term for small Indian reservations) include members whose ancestral language was Southern Pomo: Dry Creek, Cloverdale, Lytton and Graton. There is currently one known speaker, from Dry Creek, and a handful of partial speakers.

Work on the language

A small amount of data was collected by early researches such as Samuel Barrett; however, no real work was done until Abraham M. Halpern, in the 1940s, collected a number Southern Pomo words and texts as part of a larger effort to collect data on all the Pomo languages. Halpern published one article, "Southern Pomo h and ʔ and Their Reflexes", which dealt with aspects of Southern Pomo phonology. Halpern's unpublished notes are currently housed at the University of California, Berkeley. Robert L. Oswalt, who wrote a grammar of the related Kashaya (Southwestern Pomo) language, began to collect Southern Pomo data approximately twenty years after Halpern's fieldwork. Oswalt eventually published one glossed and translated text, "Retribution for Mate-Stealing: A Southern Pomo Tale", as well as a number of other articles which included Southern Pomo data together with data from other Pomo languages. Though Oswalt did a large amount of work on a Southern Pomo dictionary, it has never been completed. There has not yet been a grammar written for the language. N. Alexander Walker, a graduate student in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, began researching Southern Pomo before and during his studies as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley and is currently working on a dictionary of Southern Pomo based on Halpern's and Oswalt's texts.

Phonetics and phonology

Southern Pomo has a rich sound system with aspirated, unaspirated, ejective and voiced stops. It has a total of 28 consonants (plus the pseudo-consonant /:/). The vowel system, in contrast, contains only five qualities. All phonemes, both consonants and vowels, can occur long. The full inventory is lain out below.

outhern Pomo consonants (in the IPA)

Bilabial p p' pʰ b m

(Post)Dental t̪ t̪' t̪ʰ

Alveolar t t' tʰ d n l s ts ts'

Post-Alveolar ʃ tʃ tʃ' tʃʰ

Velar k k' kʰ

Glottal ʔ h

Approximants j w

outhern Pomo Vowels (in the IPA)

i u e o a

yllable and word shape

No utterance in Southern Pomo may begin with a consonant cluster. The preferred shape of most stems is CVC:V~CV:CV (where : = length, /h/ or /ʔ/) such as in the words ʔakʰ:o "two", ts'iht̪a "bird". A handful of monosyllabic and trisyllabic words, such as tset' "how", he:tʃ' "nail, claw", mut̪ʰ:u:nu "lizard", violate the pattern. The Word (stem + affixes) may be up to seven syllables long or more, as in ʔihtʃij:owant̪onhkʰehlaw "also some of that which he had brought" (from Halpern text VII:10), but words of more than four syllables are uncommon in the recorded texts.

Only /w/, /j/, /n/, and the ejective stops can be word-final within the general lexicon(though there is one dubious record of a word for "ogre" ending with an aspirated velar stop). The glottal stop occurs word-finally in some kinship terms.

Syncope is one of the commonest features of Southern Pomo phonology. Most trisyllabic compounds originated as two disyllabic words. The compound is made by syncopating the first vowel of the second word and deleting some consonants (depending on the acceptability of the ensuing clusters).

tress

Southern Pomo stress is, ostensibly, always on the penult. The correlates of stress are poorly understood. Raised pitch might be the most salient correlate. The first syllable of a stem seems to carry a secondary stress which is also realized primarily through raised pitch (which causes stress clash in trisyllabic words).

The Pseudo-Consonant /:/

Length in Southern Pomo, symbolized by /:/, behaves differently than it does in any of the other Pomo languages. It patterns with the two glottal consonants in its distribution and within in word stems. Geminate consonants are approximately twice as long and singletons. Affricates, like /ts/, are not rearticulated (i.e. kats:i "cold" is [kattsi] not [katstsi] ).