Vowels and vowelharmony in Akan
From: | taliesin the storyteller <taliesin@...> |
Date: | Sunday, January 24, 1999, 19:49 |
This year I'm doing Linguistics 102, and the topic for 102
in spring 1999 happens to be Akan, a very interesting
african language with approximately six million speakers in
the southerm half of Ghana. Sine it has several 'cool
features', I though I'd share some of them with the list as
I dig into the stuff myself. Stay tuned!
USE A FIXED-WIDTH FONT! (for instance courier)
source: Dolphyne, "The Akan (Twi-Fante) Language. Its Sound
Systems and Tonal Structure" (1988)
i \---------------- u -----
\ |
\ e. o. |
e \--------------------| o
\ |
\ |
3 \-----------------| c
\ (a.) |
\ |
\---------------
a =20
a. is not phonemic, but an allophone of a. Not all dialects
use it.
All back vowels (u o. o c) are rounded, all others unrounded.
High and low vowels have nazalized counterparts. The
nazalization is=A0phonemic, but not marked in the orthography.
i i~ e. e.~ a a~ o. o.~ u u~
Mid vowels (e 3 c o) are oral only.
-------------------------------------------------------
Vowel harmony, advanced tongue root (the Fante dialect has=20
rounding harmony in some verb-affixes as well)
SET I: i e a. o u (ATR+)
SET II: e. 3 a c o. (ATR-)
Generally, in a word of more than one syllable, only vowels
of one set may occur.
tal.