Sounds and Spelling
Owens Valley Paiute is written with the Latin alphabet plus a couple of letters English doesn't use, and it has a few sounds worth knowing before you start reading words aloud.
The special letters
- ü: a high vowel made with the tongue high and the lips unrounded, somewhere between English "ee" and "uh." It's in some of the most common words in the language, like nüü ("I") and tüba ("pinenut").
- ŵ: a nasal w. Make it like an m, but without quite closing your lips, so part of the sound comes through your nose. The two are closely related: at a morpheme boundary, an m often softens to ŵ. For instance the postposition -ma ("with, using") becomes -ŵa after some words — Nüümü-ŵa means "in Paiute" (Nüümü + -ma). It's one of the fortis/lenis shifts below. You'll also see ŵ inside plural words like mahuŵa ("they").
- ' (the apostrophe): a glottal stop, the catch in the middle of English "uh-oh."
Vowel length also matters: a long vowel (written double, like the aa in kwi'naa', "eagle") can distinguish one word from another. Hold the doubled vowels a beat longer.
The special letters ü and ŵ aren't on most keyboards, so in everyday writing people often drop the marks (plain u for ü, plain w for ŵ) and you'll sometimes see m written in place of ŵ. So one word can show up spelled a few different ways. This wiki keeps the full, marked forms for clarity, but don't be thrown when you see other spellings out in the world.
Throughout this wiki you'll see words written with hyphens like tüka-ti, i-bia, paya-neika. These are morpheme markers: they show where one meaningful piece of a word ends and the next begins. They have no effect on pronunciation and are purely a reading aid that helps you see the pieces. You'll often find the same words written solid elsewhere (tükati, ibia).
When sounds shift: fortis/lenis
The most common sound pattern in OVP is the fortis/lenis shift ("strong/weak"). When morphemes join — a prefix or suffix meeting a word — the consonant at the seam changes. Usually it softens (t→d, p→b, s→z, k→g, m→ŵ); now and then it goes the other way and hardens (w→gw).
| Plain | Becomes | Example |
|---|---|---|
| t | d | tüka (eat) → ma-düka (eating it) |
| p | b | puggu (horse) → i-buggu (my horse) |
| s | z | sawa (cook) → ma-zawa (cooking it) |
| k | g | kütsei (charge) → ui-gütsei-wei (will charge them) |
| m | ŵ | -ma ("with") → -ŵa — Nüümü-ŵa ("in Paiute") |
| w | gw | wanga' (younger brother) → isha'-gwanga' (fox, "coyote's little brother") |
So "to eat" is tüka, but "I am eating it" is "Nüü ma-düka-ti". The t has become d because the object prefix ma- is in front of it.
There are patterns to when these changes happen, and there are exceptions. You don't need to memorize, though. You'll absorb them naturally as you see more words. Just notice the shift when it happens. You'll see it again in Object Prefixes and Possession.
What's Next
If you're following the suggested reading path, the next step is Verbs — the action words. As you'll see, a single verb is already a sentence.