Revisiting the status of labialised consonants in contemporary Amharic (original) (raw)
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Current Trends in Phonology: Theoretic Account of Amharic Spirintization
Humanities and Social Sciences
This paper intends to illustrate an analysis about one of the common phonological process known as spirantization in Amharic in the framework of Optimality and Feature Geometry. The theoretical models we have been assuming -known as the linear theory of representation-was quite successful in explaining a number of facts about sound systems. A defining characteristic of the theory is the view that segments are matrices of feature values, where every segment has a specification for each of the two dozen distinctive features. There were, however, phonological realms which the theory had largely ignored, and that were spirintization and assimilation. The process of these phonological processes in Amharic language can be shown and represented in Optimality Theory and Feature Geometry more clearly than in linear phonology. The method used in this research is analytical-descriptive. Six native speakers who were selected from different age groups that ranges from 30 to 50 and different educational levels were interviewed. Furthermore, free conversation and life stories were also included in the corpus. The data gathered is phonemically transcribed following the IPA conventions as revised to 2005 and analyzed using Optimality and Feature Geometry. Amharic, which is one of the most important languages of Ethiopia, is mainly spoken in Amhara regional state of Ethiopia. The language belongs to Transversal South-Ethio-Semitic group of the Afro-Asiatic language phylum. According to the 2007 Population Census, Census (2008) report, there are around 22 million Amharic native speakers and additional 7 million second language speakers. The language spoken in this region can be divided into four general regional dialects. The investigation of the major dialectal variations and isoglosses of Amharic are scanty. The available literature identifies four major dialects of Amharic: Gojjam, Gonder, Shewa and Wollo. Although the isoglosses and internal dialectal variations are hitherto not clearly established, the literature agrees on the mutual intelligibility among the dialects of this language. In Amharic, there are two consonants which engage in spirantization process. These consonants include /b, k / which are changed to the fricatives. Lenition patterns are expressed in terms of conflicts between the effort minimization constraint, LAZY, and on the other hand a class of lenition-blocking constraints. Spirantization, for example, is analyzed in terms of rankings where LAZY dominates IDENT (x). Under the opposite ranking, spirantization is blocked. There are three major feature groups, laryngeal features, manner features and place features, which Clements calls Class Nodes. In spirantization process, in the manner node, the feature (continuant) is added to a stop consonant, producing a fricative at the same place.
The Morphology of Amharic Ideophones
Zena Lissan
Amharic ideophones are marginalized word classes in most descriptive grammar studies. However, this paper aims to describe and classify ideophones of the language. In addition to this, ideophones are universally considered to have little morphology. Nevertheless, this study identifies several morphological processes which ideophones of the language undergo. Amharic ideophones mainly undergo compounding, derivation, reduplication, and sometimes inflectional morphology. Moreover, in the language, ideophonic verb stems undergo total and partial reduplications. These reduplicated verb stems are further compounded with auxiliaries al-'say' and adərrəɡ-'do/make' to show verbal and adverbial functions. Besides, the study classifies ideophones mainly into verbal and nominal (noun) ideophones. Non-reduplicated ideophone-based verbs function as a verb and the reduplicated ideophone-based verbs have an adverbial function. Furthermore, ideophonic verbs collocate with the dummy verb al-'say' form intransitive verb, and ideophonic verbs which collocate with the dummy verb adərrəɡ-'do/make' form transitive verbs. As the finding shows, some simple nouns reduplicate and compound with auxiliaries to express taste, smells, and some internal feelings. Lastly, derived nominal ideophones also undergo inflections for nominative and accusative cases and number and gender like the regular nouns of the language.
Gemination in Amharic: Examination of the Duration of Amharic Consonants
This study investigated the duration of Amharic consonants. Three native speakers were recorded reading geminate and nongeminate Amharic words prepared in a list and durations were extracted using Praat. The results showed that Amharic consonants can be twice as long as singletons and word final consonants were found to be longer in word final position than in word medial position. Voiceless consonants were longer than voiced consonants in both word medial and word final positions as both geminates and singletons. However, there was no statistically significant differences between the duration of geminate voiced and voiceless consonants.
Critical Analysis on Frequency of Amharic Sounds: the perspective of corpus Linguistics
Daagu International Journal of Basic & Applied Research, 2019
ABSTRACT Corpus linguistics basically give more emphasis to collocation, frequency and corpus statistics. This study intends to investigate the frequency of Sounds in Amharic, to explore the unique linguistic features found in Amharic, and to assess the nature and characteristics of Amharic fields. Critical research paradigm was used in this study. To achieve the objectives of the study the researcher used elicitation and documents analysis as data gathering method. To briefly summarize the findings of the study, in terms of sound articulations the characteristics of all consonants in Amharic is the same except ሀ /ha/. In Amharic lexicons the frequency of the sixth sound or sadɪs fidels is very high. More explicitly, in most basic or core vocabularies of Amharic the sixth or sadɪs fidels are occur frequently 68.75 % in average. This indicate that, the frequency of the sixth sound or sadɪs fidel in Amharic language is very high especially in basic or core vocabularies. The distribution of the sixth sound or sadɪs fidel is might be at the first syllable or the last syllable. Therefore its distribution is not common. In other words, the sadɪs sound may come at the beginning of word or middle of word or end of a lexicons. Orthographically speaking, single fidel or consonant can convey full text or message. For example: ና /na/ ‘come’, ያ /ja/ ‘that’this can be considered as the unique feature of the target language. In Amharic, it is very tough to get the sixth fidel followed by the long vowel. Therefore, in lexicon creativity and productivity linguists should consider the sixth fidel to create the non-existing lexicon in Amharic. Keywords: Corpus, fidel, Frequency, Amharic
2020
This dissertation examines the voice system of Amharic. I have studied the voice features including an anticausative and a pair of causative functional items focusing on their selection, interpretation and syntactic projection. The voice items display some interesting properties that made them worth an indepth inves tigation. First, the single anticausative morpheme is associated with multiple constructions such as the passive, reciprocal, reflexive, middle and the like. This raises the foundational theoretical problem on the relation between form and meaning. I also want to forward my special thanks to Eba Teresa for reading part of this dissertation and judging on the grammaticality of the Amharic sentences. Many thanks to him. My time in Tromsø would have been boring if I didn't have such dear friends as Etaferahu
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2021
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Acoustic characteristics of ejectives in amharic
Interspeech 2009, 2009
In this paper, a preliminary investigation of the acoustic characteristics of Amharic ejectives in comparison with their unvoiced conjugates is presented. The normalized error from linear prediction residual and a zero frequency resonator output are used to locate the instant of release of the oral closure and the instant of the start of voicing, respectively. Amharic ejectives are found to have longer closure duration and smaller VOT than their unvoiced conjugates. Cross-linguistic comparisons reveal that no ejectives of two languages behave acoustically in a similar manner despite similarity in their articulation.
SIL Electronic Working Papers, 2010
This study presents the phonology of Awngi, a major Central Cushitic language spoken in Northern Ethiopia. Awngi has six vowels, one of which an almost predictable epenthetic vowel /ɨ/, and twenty-nine consonants, of which five are labialized and two are post-stopped fricatives. Two tone levels are also contrastive in the language. This paper presents evidence for contrast and variation for all Awngi phonemes, a description of the syllable structure, a discussion of the phonological rules, and a list of 325 Awngi words in IPA phonemic writing.
The speech sounds, syllable structure and tone system of a less-studied West African language, Lɛtɛ
MERCY AKROFI ANSAH, 2022
The paper describes the speech sounds, syllable structure and tone system of a less-studied, West African language, Lɛtɛ. Lɛtɛ is a South-Guan language of Ghana, West Africa, and genetically affiliated to the Niger-Congo family of languages. Eberhard, Simons and Fennig (2019) sub-classifies Guan (Niger-Congo, Kwa) into two language clusters: North Guan and South Guan, to which Lɛtɛ belongs. Lɛtɛ has a symmetrical set of nine vowels, 4 front vowels produced with an advanced tongue root position and four back vowels produced with a retracted tongue root position. The ninth vowel is a low central vowel, /ǝ /, which is produced with an advanced tongue root position, but unpaired. Its vowel and consonant systems are akin to those of related African languages. The study was purely field-based. Data were collected through elicitation from language speakers who resided in the speech community. Speech sounds and tone patterns were audio recorded and later transcribed and analysed. Tongue root vowel harmony controls vowel distribution to a large measure. A single syllable may be constituted by a vowel, a consonant followed by a vowel (CV), or a nasal consonant. The lexical tone helps to distinguish meaning, whereas the grammatical tone functions to mark tense and aspectual distinctions. It was observed that in many respects, aspects of Lɛtɛ phonology described are akin to other Kwa languages in the Niger-Congo family.