Letter EE

Letter ee is pronounced somewhat like the a in English 'bay' or 'tape' and never as in English 'beet' or 'bet'. Tanacross ee is longer in duration than e.

Click on a video below to see and hear Mrs. Irene Arnold pronouncing words with EE.

Tanacross orthographic e actually represents two distinct phonemes: a mid-front vowel /e/ and a lowered mid-front vowel /ɛ/. The contrast between these phonemes is neutralized in stem (final) syllables, where the lowered variant occurs preceding glottal consonants and the raised variant occurs elsewhere. Thus compare -ke' [-keʔ] 'foot' versus k'et[k'ɛt] 'on'.

In prefix syllables orthographic e may represent either of the phonemes /e/ or /ɛ/. However, preceding a glottal consonant e is realized as /e/.

In contrast, long ee always corresponds to the mid-front vowel phoneme /e/ and is pronounced as [e]. Thus, in existing Tanacross materials long ee is often used to represent both short /e/ and short /ɛ/. In practice, in prefix syllables short e is used almost exclusively to indicate vowel length (short) rather than quality. Thus, in the first example below the e in the first syllable is short, whereas, in the last example the ee in the first syllable (corresponding to the postpositional object prefix nee- is long. In the second example short e represents a lowered mid-front vowel.

mech’axdekdiix [mečaxdɛktiix] 'I am teaching him'
xetlghihtiił [xɛtlghiht^hiił] 'I am driving a sled'
nee'ech’axdehdiix [nee'ečaxdehtiix] 'she is teaching us'

similar sounds

E   Ę   ĘĘ  

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