Franz Boas’ early northwest coast alphabet

Michael Mackert
Morgantown, West Virginia
Summary

During his work for the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), Franz Boas (1858–1942) designed a phonetic alphabet for the Native American languages of British Columbia in his correspondence with Horatio Hale (1817–1896), who had been entrusted with the supervision of Boas’ activities. This correspondence is of importance because it provides a record of the formation of Boas’ alphabet and documents Hale’s role in this process. Boas’ correspondence and linguistic publications on Inuftitut and Bella Coola which preceded his BAAS reports show that he was already familiar with the conventions used in the alphabets of Kleinschmidt (1851), Lepsius (1863), and Rink (1884, 1887–1891) when he began fieldwork for the BAAS. His letters to John W. Powell (1834–1902) and Hale give further testimony that he was also acquainted with the alphabets of F. M. Müller (1854), Powell (1880), and Techmer (1884). In his dialogue with Hale, Boas expressed his dissatisfaction with the existing transcription systems, which he considered impracticable or deficient. Boas envisioned a scientific phonetic alphabet based on his psycholinguistic theory of phonetics. He was particularly concerned with the accurate representation of schwa, of different series of fricatives and stops, and of so-called synthetic or alternating sounds, which he encountered in the Native American languages of British Columbia. Both Boas and Hale believed future work would not corroborate the existence of surd-sonants (voiceless-voiced sounds) as members of triple series of consonants consisting of surds, surd-sonants, and sonants. Boas did not deny the existence of surd-sonants, but, within his theory of phonetics, he considered them as sounds that were alternately apperceived as being voiced and voiceless. Boas’ first version of his BAAS alphabet and his introductory remarks to the phonetics of the Native American languages described in his BAAS reports show that practical considerations (simplicity, readability, quotability, and availability of types) and Boas’ psycholinguistic interpretation of surd-sonants took priority over the latter’s concerns for an accurate scientific transcription system.

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References

* [Note that Techmer’s valuable Zeitschrift has been available as a reprint since 1973 from John Benjamins of Amsterdam, together with a new introduction by E. F. K. Koerner. – Ed.]

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