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Don Frantz developed a system of writing Blackfoot by working with native speakers, in order to create a system that makes sense for their language. Written Blackfoot is easier to read in many ways than written English, because for the most part each letter is only pronounced one way, so there is no guesswork involved. However, words can still be difficult to pronounce because they are so different from English. Blackfoot has 10 consonants, most of which are pronounced like the English sounds they represent. The table below shows the letters used to write consonants in Blackfoot. The second column shows the sound in a linguistic code called the International Phonetic Alphabet. If you are not familiar with this you can just ignore that column. Note that h and ' represent sounds that are not used in English.
Notes: Notice that the English examples for the letters p, t, and k show these sounds after an s, not at the beginning of a word. That is because in English these sounds are aspirated. This means that they have a little puff of air after them. Hold a sheet of paper in front of your mouth and compare "pit" with "spit". In "pit" the p has a puff of air, whereas in "spit" it does not. In Blackfoot p, t, and k are always pronounced without this puff of air, just like they are in English when they come after an s. The letter h in Blackfoot does not represent the same sound as the English letter h. Instead, it represents the sound found in German words such as "Bach" or "ich", or Scottish words such as "loch". The letter ' represents another sound not found in most English words. One example is the sound in the middle of "uh-oh". There are only three letters for vowels in Blackfoot, but as in English sometimes they are pronounced differently depending on what sounds come before or after them. Below are the most common basic sounds for the vowel letters.
Notes: The letter o in Blackfoot does not represent quite the same sound as o in English. In English, we usually add an "oo" sound (as in "moon") to the end of the letter o, whereas in Blackfoot this does not happen. If you speak Spanish, or know someone who does, compare English "no" with Spanish "no". The o in Spanish is the same as the o in Blackfoot. In some situations, short i sounds more like the i in “bit” (IPA: ɪ)rather than the i in “machine” (IPA: i). This occurs when i comes before two or more consonants, e.g., iihtáíkahksiststakio'p, 'a saw'. This is true even if it is the same consonant twice in a row: ksikkómahkayii, 'white swan'. If short i comes before one consonant at the end of a word it also sounds like the i in "bit": kaahtsá'tsis, 'a playing card'. However, ts and ks count as single consonants in Blackfoot, so short i does not chance before these clusters. Thus the second i in kawai'piksit, 'open', is like the i in "machine" even though it is before two consonants (because ks counts as one sound), while the third i is like the i in "bit" even though it is before one consonant (because that consonant is the end of the word). This is similar to how English counts "ch" as one sound, even though it is written with two letters. When short i comes before a single consonant + long s + another consonant, it also still sounds like the i in "machine", though these contexts are rare. For linguists: short /i/ is tense in open syllables and lax in closed syllables. /ts/ and /ks/ are affricates, and so do not form closed syllables intervocalically. Geminate stops form closed syllables, as do consonant clusters. Recent research (Denzer-King 2009, Derrick 2007) has suggested that Blackfoot has a syllabic /ss/, so CVCssC sequences are parsed as CV.CssC, meaning that when /i/ comes before CssC, it is not laxed, since it does not belong to a closed syllable. When two different vowels occur together, they often make a different sound than they would separately.
Notes: In Blackfoot we also find the sequence oi. This is not included above because it is pronounced just as it is spelled, as a sequence of o and i. This is pronounced just as in English "boy". In Blackfoot vowels and consonants can be long or short. In English when people talk about short vowels and long vowels they are referring to different sounds, like the "short" o in "hot" versus the "long" o in "moon". However, long vowels in Blackfoot sound exactly the same; the only difference is that they are held longer. Compare the long i sound in siikammi, 'crane' to the short i sound in kamó'siwa, 'to steal'. Consonants can also be long in Blackfoot, except for h and '. Compare the s sounds in sstókimiwa, 'cold water', and i'nákskimiwa, 'a small quantity of water'. Blackfoot words usually have one or two vowels which are stressed. As in Spanish or Italian, stress is marked with an accent (´). Certain sounds in Blackfoot change depending on which sounds are before or after them: Short vowels after a consonant and before h are whispered instead of being pronounced out loud, e.g., áíkahtsiwa, 'gambler'. Exceptions to this include vowels at the beginning of a word or vowels that are stressed. Vowels in several common suffixes, including -wa (third person), -istsi (inanimate plural), and -iksi (animate plural), are usually not pronounced. See the Grammar section for more information on how these suffixes are used. In the table below these vowels are enclosed in parentheses to show that they are not usually pronounced.
When an i comes after a consonant and before a vowel, it is pronounced as a y rather than a full vowel, e.g., ká'kiaki, 'I chop'. Written by Ryan Denzer-King, May 2009. Sources: Frantz & Russell (1995), Frantz (1991), Derrick (2007) Photography by Wayne Suitor © 2007 Blackfoot syllabary graphic courtesy of omniglot.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||