Re: THEORY: Mura

On Sat, 31 Jan 2004 15:05:22 +0100, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:

>My linguistics textbook mentions as the smallest known phonemic inventories
>those of Rotokas and of Mura, both at eleven. Now, the former has been
>mentioned on the list several times, but I've never heard anything of Mura
>before. It's said in the book to be Amerindian. Anyone knows anything more
>of it, for instance exactly what that undersized inventory contains?
Mura AKA Mura-Piraha~ AKA Piraha~ is spoken in the Amazonia rainforest and
the linguist who has done the greatest amount of work on it is Daniel
Everett. I'm pretty sure there is a website on it, just couldn't seem to
find it.

The inventory is roughly:

p t k ?
b   g
  s
w
i
    o
  a

plus at least a two-tone system, and I believe there is also nasalization
of the vowels.
Most notable is the allophony of the voiced stops: /b/ alternates with [m]
and [B] (a labial trill, *not* a labial fricative) - I believe the trill
occurs _/o/ - while /g/ alternates with [n] and [*], a sound that I have
never found a succesful transciption for (and certainly will not attempt in
ASCII IPA): it is described by Everett as a lateral double flap in which
the underside of the tongue finishes by striking the lower lip (think
extreme lingual protrusion), so approximately a lateral flap plus linguo-
sublabial flap - he described it with a diagram in an old issue of the JIPA
back in the late 70's or early 80's. IIRC the environs of the lateral flap
was /o/_/i/. So the word for 'milk' /ibogi/ may be produced with both the
labial trill and lateral double flap, [ibogi ~ iBo*i].

Bfowol

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