Lesson Plan #0: Pronunciation, Tones and Names

Lesson #0: Pronunciation and Tones

As a kind of "final project" to wrap up the unit on Ket I'll be posting lesson plans for a hypothetical 101-level Ket course.

Pronunciation:

Ket is a hard language to pronounce but with some practice it becomes easy.  Following are tables of Ket phonemes.  When allophones are shown, they are ordered from word-initial, to intervocalic, to word-final.  Please memorize allophones, as actual pronunciation may differ from the orthography used here. (e.g. bikit "foreigner" pronounced [biɣit].  Irregular allophonic usage will be marked.

Consonants:

Bilabial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
b [b, v, p]	s	j	k [k, ɣ, g]	q [qχ, ʁ, q]	h [h, χ]
m	t, d [d, ɾ]		ŋ
	n
	l [tɬ, ɮ, ɬ]

...and vowels:

Front	Central/Back Unrounded	Central/Back Rounded
i	ɨ [ɨ, ɯ]	u
e [e, ɛ]	o [o, ɔ]	ə [ə, ʌ, ɤ]
a [æ, a, ɑ]

Ket also uses a Cyrillic alphabet in printed works. However, let's stick to the Latin one for now.

Tonal System:

Ket has four tones:

High Even	qoj	“uncle, aunt”
Glottalized	qo'j	“wish”
Rising-Falling	qooj	“neighboring”
Falling	qòj	bear

When we agglutinate morphemes together, we drop tones, unless marked otherwise.

Make sure you have your tones right! After all, you'd hate to call someone's aunt a bear.

Names

Source for tables: Vajda 2013