This page provides an overview of the vowels of Potawatomi. Vowels are sounds that are produced with minimal interruption of the flow of air in the vocal tract.
There are two competing theories of the Potawatomi vowel system, both of which are covered on this page.
This page provides audio examples so you can listen, practice, and decide for yourself!
Vowels are perhaps more complex than consonants. When you make a vowel sound like, you achieve the desired sound by raising, lowering, protruding and retracting your tongue and rounding the lips to adjust the shape of your mouth and throat. (Try it yourself! Feel the movement - get carried away with it! eeeh aaaahhh ooooo!)
It is very common for vowels to have a lot of variation. Getting the tongue in precisely the right position every time is hard! Think about English dialects, for an example: for some English speakers in northern Wisconsin, the words cot and caught sound exactly the same, whereas other English speakers pronounce those two words differently -- and some people are in between, where sometimes they are the same and sometimes not.
Okay, that's complicated. But the point is, try not to be too surprised if you hear a word pronounced three times and hear slightly different vowels each time!
For a long time, linguists wrote that Potawatomi has only five vowels. Hunter Lockwood, in his dissertation, writes that Potawatomi has 6 vowels. There are four long or strong vowels, which include:
Then, there are two short or weak vowels, which include:
The strong-weak distinction is an important part of how words are put together in Potawatomi. Consider the examples below:
bmosé's/he walks'mbemsé'I walk'bmodé's/he crawls'mbemodé'I crawl'The <o> in the word bmosé 's/he walks' disappears in the second example because it is a weak vowel. Similarly, the word mbemsé shows an <e> that disappears in the first example - because <e> is also a weak vowel. The true, underlying word for the verb 'walk' is /bemosé/, but only one of the first two vowels can appear at a time. This is called syncope, and it is a form of rhythmic vowel deletion that is common throughout the world's languages.
But then look at the second pair of examples. For the 'crawl' verbs, we see the same shifting pattern for the weak vowel <e>, but not for the <o>.
Lockwood's theory of the vowels is sometimes criticized as too abstract - when you see an e, you don't know exactly how it will be pronounced. This can make it hard for people still learning the language, who need to remember each and every sound. That is certainly true; but linguists argue that what's important in human language is figuring out which differences make a difference, and which differences can be ignored. The incredible variation of the <e> vowel makes sense from a linguist's perspective, because they have a theory of how that came to be which involves comparisons with Ojibwe, Fox, and studying the history of Potawatomi. Whether or no it makes sense for you is something you'll have to decide for yourself.
Still, there is a reasonable suspicion that Potawatomi vowels are more complicated than the linguists' picture reveals.
The FCPLO was developed by Potawatomi teachers because students were having a hard time mastering the nuances of the sounds of Potawatomi. The writing system coming out of Forest County uses a variety of what are called diacritics - little marks above the vowel to give you more information about the sound it stands for.
There are 8 vowels in this system, which include:
Unlike the linguists' theory, there is no distinction of length or strength among these vowels.
The FCPLO system is sometimes criticized for not marking a strong-weak vowel contrast; when you see a word written with <é>, you don't know whether or not that vowel will have to be dropped in a different context. That is certainly true, but beginners have to learn much of that pattern by rote memorization anyway.
Another criticism of the FCPLO could be that it is almost too detailed; it might require learners to listen for details that do not add a meaningful difference. For instance, the word for 's/he walks' could be pronounced several different ways, which would end up in this system with several different spellings, including bmosé, with the "bat" vowel at the end, or bmosė with the 'bet' vowel at the end. Speakers can hear the difference between the two, but it doesn't change the core meaning.