Back in 2018 I posted about the Australian Aboriginal language Yanyuwa because “it’s one of the few languages in the world where men and women speak different dialects”; now I’m coming at it from a totally different angle, thanks to this Facebook post by Alex Foreman (I am quoting the entire text):
I made a joke about how if someone finds a language without any voiceless consonants I’d have to accept it as real, typology be damned, and then someone pointed out that yeah that’s actually a thing.
Man just look at this feature grid. This is utterly deranged. This may be the most insane arrangement of contrasts I’ve ever seen, including Ubykh. This is like Danish vowels. We’re in whacky conlang territory.
He then has a screenshot of the Phonology section of the Wikipedia article, which is truly a thing of wonder. The intro says “Yanyuwa is extremely unusual in having 7 places of articulation for stops, compared to 3 for English and 4–6 for most other Australian languages. Also unusual is the fact that Yanyuwa has no voiceless phoneme […].” It also has 16 noun classes, not to mention the male and female dialects and the less unusual (though still striking) avoidance speech and ritual speech (“For example, a dingo is usually referred to as wardali, but during ritual occasions, the word used is yarrarriwira“). Languages are endlessly interesting!
Jean F. Kirton (1967) ‘Anyula phonology’ Papers in Australian Linguistics No. 1. A-10:15–28 (available here) has the following remark on the Yanyuwa (Anyula) stops:
Similarly, Marija Tabain & Andrew Butcher (1999) ‘Stop consonants in Yanyuwa and Yindjibarndi:
locus equation data’ Journal of Phonetics 27:333–357 ( doi.org/10.1006/jpho.1999.0099 ) give a phoneme chart in which the stops are transcribed as p, m, ᵐp, etc.
Also note the remarks in the Frankfurt archive of a version of the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database here:
I have no special knowledge of the matter, however. I am simply curious about the actual realizations of the stop allophones.
There is a recording of a Yanyuwa speaker here. Perhaps someone can find more recordings?
Also interesting about Yanyuwa: Malay and other Austronesian loanwords brought into the languages of the region by the trepang trade, as studied in Nicholas Evans (1992) Macassan Loanwords in Top End Languages and Antoinette Schapper (2022) Beyond ‘Macassans’: Speculations on layers of Austronesian contact in northern Australia, for instance.
Kirton & Charlie (1978) ‘Seven articulatory positions in Yanyuwa consonants’, mentioned above, is available here, pages 179–197.
Yes, I think Alex Foreman may have been misled by the usual Australianist convention of using the symbols for voiced stops when (as commonly) a language doesn’t have a voicing contrast in stops.
The existence of many points of articulation but few manners of articulation, with lots of subdivisions between alveolars and dentals etc is also very common in Australian languages. The only real peculiarity of Yanyuwa seems to be in also contrasting velars and palatals.
Sixteen noun classes is a lot (though not by Volta-Congo standards!), though it would be nice to have a better idea of just how they function. The WP article rather suggests that some creative accounting has been going on to get to sixteen, like counting obligatorily possessed nouns as separate classes, and conflating different speech levels into one total.
Ah, I should have learned by now not to trust WP.
Well, it’s even better: instead of just one language of weird, it’s a whole continent of weird …
It’s been suggested that the typical Australian pattern of lots of positions of articulation but few manners of articulation has something to do with an unusually high level of middle ear infections in children, but I seem to recall a paper suggesting that this neat explanation doesn’t really work out when you look at the details (like all too many neat explanations.)
The paper finding that “this neat explanation doesn’t really work out” was linked and briefly discussed here a couple of years ago.
@Xerib: Thanks for all the work. As usual,
I want to believe in a long history of pre-colonial contact across the Timor Sea. It makes no sense that millennia of skilled seafarers wouldn’t cross that sea repeatedly. My main objection is that there doesn’t seem to be any genetic trace of this contact. That is – almost unhuman.