Re: Beek

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

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