The Phonemes of an Araucanian Dialect

1 Araucanian is a native Southamerican language spoken by about 200,000 people in Chili, and by an only roughly calculated but far lesser number of speakers in Argentina (more or less 8,000). They are concentrated chiefly in the provinces of Bio-Bio, Malleco, and Cautin (Chile), and in the province of Neuqu6n in Argentina. 2 Rodolfo Lenz, Estudios Araucanos, Santiago de Chile, 1895-1897 (reprint with different paging from Anales de la Universidad de Chile, vols. 9098, 1895-1897. I quote from the reprint). I have made use of Lenz's other studies on the Araucanian language, especially the one appeared in Biblioteca de Dialectologia Hispanoamericana 6.234244 (Buenos Aires, 1940). Lenz was a distinguished phonetician; for data on his scholarship see Amado Alonso, Biblioteca de Dialectologia Hispanoamericana 6.269-278. 3 Lenz recognizes among the Araucanians from Chili four linguistic groups: Picunche, Huiliche, Pehuenche, and Moluche. This division agrees with the tribal classification by John M. Cooper in Handbook of Southamerican Indians 2.690 (1946), where the Moluche is called Mapuche. But since the differences between Pehuenche and Moluche are small, and only lexical, Lenz seems to consider them as two subdivisions of the same dialect (cf. 0.2. The corpus consists of 345 rather brief utterances in conversational form, 37 traditional tales, 7 descriptive narratives, and 15 songs. The transcription is phonetic. Each symbol is in general accurately and unambiguously explained, except perhaps a couple of them that need some interpretation as to their exact phonetic value.4 Lenz was consciously aware, in most cases, of free and conditioned variants-physiological, and phonetically conditioned variants, in his own terms-so that an approximate phonemic analysis of segmental phonemes is already implicit in his remarks. Nevertheless, the phonemic status of certain sounds remains somewhat dubious owing chiefly, I believe, to two circumstances: (1) sounds of low frequency, and morphemes of few occurrences seem not to have been sufficiently rechecked; (2) the transcription reflects, rather undiscriminately, incidental forms of careless speech, and divergencies in pronunciation probably due exclusively to differences in tempo. The latter will probably have to be treated as morphophonemic alternations, so that ultimately they cannot affect the phonemic analysis. More regrettable is the fact that features of stress, intonation, and juncture are either entirely disregarded or not satisfactorily described. 0.3. The present paper attempts to supply an explicit and more consistent phonemic formulation of Lenz's materials. Given the