Orthography adopted
by the Murrinh-patha Song Project
This page describes the orthography that members of our
project use for our research publications. For community
use, such as this website, we keep the orthography used in
the Our Lady of the Sacred Heart school in
Wadeye (Street 1987).
Murrinh-patha has four vowels for which there is no
phonemic length distinction. The four vowels are listed
below.
| vowels
|
+front
|
-front
|
|
+high
|
i
|
u
|
|
-high
|
e
|
a
|
For the consonants, there are six places of articulation
and a voicing contrast for the stops. However in nasal-stop
clusters the contrast is essentially neutralised. In these
environments, rather than choose a particular series, we
represent the stops as voiced or voiceless, as we hear them
on a word-by-word basis. We recognise that certain
speakers’ pronunciations of the same word may on
occasion differ. To represent the alveolar nasal/voiced
velar stop cluster we use an apostrophe /n’g/ so as
to avoid confusion with the velar nasal /ng/.
| consonants
|
bilabial
|
dental
|
alveolar
|
retroflex
|
palatal
|
velar
|
| voiceless stop
|
p
|
th
|
t
|
rt
|
tj
|
k
|
| voiced
stop
|
b
|
dh
|
d
|
rd
|
dj
|
g
|
| nasal
|
m
|
nh
|
n
|
rn
|
ny
|
ng
|
| lateral
|
|
l
|
rl
|
|
||
|
flap/trill
|
|
rr
|
|
|||
|
glides
|
w
|
|
r
|
|
y
|
|
The above orthography, differs
from the that in use at the Our Lady of the Sacred Heart school in
Wadeye (Street 1987), which has a single laminal series
and uses voiceless stops in nasal clusters.
For further information about our orthography contact
Joe
Blythe.