Возможности цифровых технологий…: описание аллофонов передних гласных, гортанного смычного и объектного согласования глагола в энецком языке
Advantages of digital technologies: a description of front vowel allophones, of a glottal stop, and of verbal object cross-reference in Enets

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses digital resources now existing for Enets (a corpus and sound dictionaries) and illustrates new descriptive possibilities entailed by their usage. Two examples from the Enets phonology, known for its extreme variability, and one example from the Enets grammar are used for the purpose. Firstly, a distributional analysis of front vowel allophones [i], [ɨ], and [e] is suggested; the logic of this distribution had so far eluded scholars of Enets: it turns out to be connected both to optional palatalization of the preceding consonant (and this connection is statistical rather than categorical, which means it could hardly be described without the data on the frequency of various phonetic realizations of Enets phonemes, provided now by the sound dictionary) and to the existence of all three allophones [i], [ɨ], and [e] by /e/, though not by /i/. Secondly, all types of phonetic realizations of the glottal stop phoneme are listed with spectrograms, and this description allows for rebutting of an earlier hypothesis by [Siegl 2013] that a recent sound change could be observed here. Thirdly, analysis of all interrogative sentences taken out from the Enets corpus helps to understand what controls the presence of the object crossreference marker in an Enets verb. A story of creation and usage of the Enets digital resources speaks for advantages of these new methodological approaches and invites scholars of other underdescribed languages to follow the path.

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