Kaqchikel Sounds
¡Xqa q’ij, k’a!
¡Buenas tardes!
We recently just finished our first week of Kaqchikel classes. Woo! It has been a whirlwind of information from amazing teachers and peers in a very beautiful country! As other posts point out, we have been spending this time either listening or attempting to speak Kaqchikel and rarely speak any other languages, although sometimes revert to Spanish when we need translations of sentences or something of that sort.
This past week, consequently, has been spent making all sorts of fun and new sounds. As non-native speakers of Kaqchikel this has been quite the challenge for us. More specifically I am referring to the lovely ejectives that exist in Kaqchikel. Ejectives, according to the very indubitable Wikipedia, occur in approximately 20% of the world’s languages, and most of these languages are minority languages that are not very frequently heard outside of their own speech community. Ejectives are stops made without using air, i.e., holding your breath. If you attempt to produce a consonant sound such as /t/ or /p/ while holding your breath and then releasing it would ideally become an ejective, marked as /t’/ and /p’/. In the greeting buenas tardes in Kaqchikel: xqa q’ij, k’a, there are two ejective stops, /q’/ and /k’/. Easy enough, right?
Not. Or, at least, for me. To start, if you speak English natively, you can produce an ejective by pronouncing the word ‘kick’ and really enunciating the final k at the end of the word. It can be difficult to get the sound down but it’s worth a try! You never know when you will want to start learning a language such as Kaqchikel :)
Thanks for reading!
¡Buenas tardes!
We recently just finished our first week of Kaqchikel classes. Woo! It has been a whirlwind of information from amazing teachers and peers in a very beautiful country! As other posts point out, we have been spending this time either listening or attempting to speak Kaqchikel and rarely speak any other languages, although sometimes revert to Spanish when we need translations of sentences or something of that sort.
This past week, consequently, has been spent making all sorts of fun and new sounds. As non-native speakers of Kaqchikel this has been quite the challenge for us. More specifically I am referring to the lovely ejectives that exist in Kaqchikel. Ejectives, according to the very indubitable Wikipedia, occur in approximately 20% of the world’s languages, and most of these languages are minority languages that are not very frequently heard outside of their own speech community. Ejectives are stops made without using air, i.e., holding your breath. If you attempt to produce a consonant sound such as /t/ or /p/ while holding your breath and then releasing it would ideally become an ejective, marked as /t’/ and /p’/. In the greeting buenas tardes in Kaqchikel: xqa q’ij, k’a, there are two ejective stops, /q’/ and /k’/. Easy enough, right?
Not. Or, at least, for me. To start, if you speak English natively, you can produce an ejective by pronouncing the word ‘kick’ and really enunciating the final k at the end of the word. It can be difficult to get the sound down but it’s worth a try! You never know when you will want to start learning a language such as Kaqchikel :)
Thanks for reading!
For the more technically inclined: ejectives are made by creating a glottal constriction (like the one that happens between the two parts of "uh-oh") right after the release of the stop closure.
ReplyDeleteAnd, you can listen to some Kaqchikel for yourself by going to the Langscape page for Kaqchikel (http://langscape.umd.edu/iso/cak) and clicking the sound icon!