There was an article in the Chicago Tribune today about the dying Haida language, spoken in the islands between British Columbia and Alaska (I can't find a link to the article on the Internet). According to the article, a language is considered "nearly extinct" when those who speak it are aged and number 50 or fewer. There are currently about 60 people fluent in Haida, and the youngest fluent speaker of Haida is 58 years old. Apparently, since the 1930s about 300-400 languages worldwide have vanished.

Both US and Canadian officials had been encouraging the people on these islands to speak English as they said they'd do better in school.
However, residents of Skidegate, in the Queen Charlotte Islands, are now developing a Haida Immersion Program. So far 12 elders have recorded about 15,000 words and 3,250 commonly used phrases. They are also developing lessons for the schools. They describe it as a guttural language with sounds similar to those used in German. "Thank you," for example is written as Haaw7a. Has anyone heard of this language? I particularly wondered about a letter 7 in that word. Is that just the way of describing a letter that we don't have, do you think? Other words are awga for "mother" and Dang ga dii k'uuga ga for "I love you." The first and second "g" were underlined (apparently [u]and[/u] doesn't work anymore to underline letters).

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kalleh,

They describe it as a guttural language with sounds similar to those used in German. "Thank you," for example is written as Haaw7a. Has anyone heard of this language? I particularly wondered about a letter 7 in that word. Is that just the way of describing a letter that we don't have, do you think? Other words are awga for "mother" and Dang ga dii k'uuga ga for "I love you." The first and second "g" were underlined (apparently [u]and[/u] doesn't work anymore to underline letters).

I've heard of the Haida language, but then I took a survey course in Native American (and Canadian) languages.

As for the orthography of Haida, it is important to remember that by using a system like the IPA you can write down most languages in the world. There's a difference between writing down a language accurately to reflect a group's or some speakers' pronunciation and developing an orthography (i.e., writing system) that is easy to use. I took a look at this page, and I see that Haida has—as do many languages in the area— a more complicated phonology than English. The gutteral sounds, the article speaks of are actual a eries of uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal consonants (voiceless stops, aspirated stops, ejectives, as well as voiceless fricatives). Uvular sounds are made using the uvula (Latin for little grape), the little bit of flesh that hangs down in the back of your throat. Pharyngeal sounds are made with the pharynx, and glottal sounds with the vocal cords or glottis. The uvular and pharyngeal sounds are written using the letters usually associated with the velar series (k, g, and x), but with diacritics (the underline you mentioned and a circumflex). If you look at the page, I linked to above, there is more than one orthography used. In one of them, the Skidegate, a digit 7 is used for the glottal stop (which is a sound that occurs in English, but is not noticed by many of its speakers because it phonologically significant). The usual sign used for glottal stops is the apostrophe in many orthographical systems, but in the IPA it looks like a question mark sans its dot: /ʔ/.

Glottal stops are infamous in some English dialects (e.g., Cockney in London) where many intervocalic dental stops are dropped: e.g. butter is pronounced /bʌʔə/.

One of the strangest orthographies I've seen in daily use in the States is on some ATMs in the region I live in. There are quite a few Hmong speakers. Hmong has something like seven tones, and they are marked not by diacritics, but by final consonants. This is not confusing for the Hmong, because their language cannot have syllable-final consonants, except some nasals.

Here's a story in Haida with commentary.

Oh, I meant to mention: a character looking a lot like the digit 7 used to be used in Old English MSS as an abbreviation for ond 'and'. Like we would use an ampersand today. Here's an explanation. It developed from a kind of shorthand (tachygraphy) called Tironian notes that survived the Roman Empire well into the Middle Ages.

According to the wikipedia entry on pharyngeals, the Haida voiced pharyngeal stop is in fact epiglottal. The epiglottis is a cartilage that hangs over the larynx.

It makes sense that Haida doesn't have a pharyngeal stop because I don't think such a sound is possible. There is no IPA symbol for it.

Wow...thanks so much for all that research and information. That Haida story was so cute!

I had no idea there was a character in Old English that looked like a 7.

Funny regarding my above post. Just yesterday (when I posted that), I read about the Old English 7. I had been looking up semicolon use in the style manuals, and the Oxford Style Manual mentioned the punctus versus and the punctus elevatus. It said that one might find the former in early manuscripts and that while it looked like a semicolon, it was used slightly differently. It said the punctus elevatus looked like an upside down semicolon and was used to separate main clauses from subordinate clauses or 2 subordinate clauses. From this site I see that the punctus versus must have been that small 7.

From this site I see that the punctus versus must have been that small 7.

From that site: "Punctus versus (which looks like a small "7" over a period; it can look like a modern semicolon): usually used for a final pause, to mark the end of a sentence (equivalent to a punctus)." That's a small digit seven over a period. The et and the punctus versus are two different symbols. It's a cool site you've found, though. Kalleh. The ancient Greeks used a punctuation mark (or stop) that looked a lot like our semicolon, 'cept it was a question mark.

Ah, I see.

Yes, I liked the site, too. I had really never thought about the origins of punctuation before. I loved this discussion of the evolution of the comma:

"Virgula suspensiva (/): in common use from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. Often used for short pauses (such as the caesura in the middle of a line of poetry), but sometimes was used as equivalent to the punctus. It could be made increasingly emphatic by doubling or even tripling. The virgule gradually dropped to the bottom of the line and curved, giving us the modern comma (the longer virgule was then redefined and used in a new manner). The comma as we know it is a sixteenth-century development (the first known use in England was in a book printed in 1521)."