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Lowering rules in Chadic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

Extract

In Frajzyngier (1981) I attempted to reconstruct vowel-raising and vowellowering rules in Chadic. Vowel-raising rules were found in three branches of Chadic, and they operated under similar conditions, viz., vowels of the stem were raised when there was a high vowel added in the suffix. Vowel-lowering rules were found in two branches of Chadic, but I could not reconstruct them as being part of Proto-Chadic because they were essentially different rules: in the East branch the vowels of the stem were lowered when a low vowel suffix was added. In the West branch the last vowel of the word was lowered when a heavy syllable preceded it. In that paper I stated that unless vowel-lowering rules were found in some other branches of Chadic, these rules could not be reconstructed as existing in Proto-Chadic. It now appears that such rules do exist in other branches. In Mulwi, or Munjuk, a Biu-Mandara language, there exists a vowel-lowering rule that operates under similar conditions as vowel-lowering rules in the East Branch l anguages, Mubi and Migama.

Type
Notes and Communications
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1986

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References

REFERENCES

Frajzyngier, Z. 1981. ‘Some rules concerning vowels in chadic' BSOAS, XLIV, 2, 334–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
P, Newman. 1972. ‘Syllable weight as a phonological variable' Studies in African Linguistics, III, 3, 301–24.Google Scholar
Tourneux, H. 1978 Le mulwi ou vulum de Mogroum, Paris: SELAF.Google Scholar