Phonetics and physiology of the historical shift of uvulars to pharyngeals in Nuuchahnulth (Nootka)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the phonetic typology of pharyngeal sounds and presents external articulatory evidence for the phonological shift from uvular ejectives to pharyngeals in the Nootka dialects of Nuuchahnulth, based on the theory of the function of the aryepiglottic laryngeal sphincter mechanism. The phonetic structure of postvelar sounds is evaluated laryngoscopically in Wakashan and in Salish (cross-linguistically) to explain the historical phonological change through articulatory data. The physiological evidence suggests that uvulars may acquire phonetic characteristics of pharyngeals by adding an extra gesture to an existing sound. We conclude that postvelars can increase in complexity incrementally and that the complex pharyngeals of Wakashan and Salish can be explained through an articulatory phonetic hierarchy. The evolution of epiglottal components in each of the two phonologies is accounted for by the adaptation of existing glottal and pharyngeal elements. Implications for phonology are that features such as [RTR] and nodes such as pharyngeal can be attributed to the action of the laryngeal sphincter mechanism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".