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Re: Beek

From:Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>
Date:Monday, September 15, 2003, 15:48
At 10:28 AM 9/15/03 -0400, H. S. Teoh wrote:


>Mmmm, I like syllabic consonants. :-) (Pity Ebisedian doesn't have any.)
Then you're just going to have to start working on a new language that does have syllabic consonants, aren't you? :-) I don't know about other Bantu languages, but Chichewa (properly written with a circumflex over the <w> IIRC) has syllabic nasals (but not liquids. e.g. the words for 'milk' and 'cucumber', which are both "mkaka". (The words are a minimal pair. One of them has a H tone on the middle syllable, the other is all L tones, but don't ask me which is which; I could not tell you the meaning of each of them if my life depended on it.) If you like syllabic consonants, then you'd like one of the languages that I'm working on. (It's the one that has caused me to start the trhread on acute accents.) In it, the word <karm>, 'shield" is pronounced in two syllables. (The word should properly be written with an accent over the <a> to indicate stress on the first syllable.) As a matter of fact, the /m/ is syllabic here because liquid plus nasal clusters in the syllable coda are illegal, to the illegal cluster is broken up by making the m syllabic. Other words from the same language with syllabic consonants: <tovl>, 'to instruct' and <tovlm>, 'instruction' (both of which should have accents over the <l> to indicate that it is stressed (It is the /l/ that determines the stressed syllable in all forms of this word, whether or not the /l/ is actually the nucleus of the syllable. In forming a present active participle of this verb, the /l/ ends up in the syllable onset, and the word is stressed on the second syllable, which contains the /l/. <tovleis>, 'instructing'; <toerevl>, (stressed on the second to last syllable) means 'war"; and then there is the minimal pair <mta> and <mta>, one of them stressed on the syllabic /m/ the other stressed on the <ai>. (I don't know what either word in the minimal pair actually means, but I think that they are probably verbs.) This has nothing to do with syllabic consonants, but <mta> and its minimal pair can each take a pair of suffixes which are themselves a minimal pair by stress. There are two suffixes -i, one of which carries stress, the other of which is unstressed. (I don't know the meaning of either of the suffixes yet, either.) When you add the stressed -i to either of the <mta>'s, the stress shifts to the final syllable, and it suddenly becomes homophonous with other <mtai>. Of course, they remain a minimal pair when the unstressed -i is added. (I wrote these words out and showed them to my husband, and he thought that it looked atrocious, or at least unappetizing or unappealing. It turned him off, in any case. I think there were too many consonants together and that he didn't like the look of accents over consonants.) Isidora

Replies

Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>
Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>Syllabic consonants (was: Re: Beek)
JS Bangs <jaspax@...>
Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>Syllabic consonants (was: Re: Beek)
Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>Syllabic consonants (was: Re: Beek)