I’m preparing a handout on morphology in Akan today, and it’s always enjoyable and insightful to look at compounds in other languages. For example, lion decomposes into chew + metal. Not that we should draw any Whorfian conclusions from these kinds of things—do you dissect and reassemble grasshopper every time you hear that word or do you immediately think of the mental concept/real-world extension of the word?
![As my previous post suggests, today is a linguistics-and-LaTeX day for me. I’m writing about Akan, the language I “adopted” for study in my African linguistics class. The image above shows autosegmental derivations from the word /fʊnɔ/ (‘to be emaciated’) in three dialects of Akan. Depending on the dialect, /fɔnʊ/ can be realized as [fɔ̃n], [fɔ̃ŋ] or [fɔ̃ʊ̃]. The sound changes at work in these words are fairly simple but the dialectal divergence and variety here is kind of nuts. [Data via E. N. Abakah, “Phonological analysis of word-final consonants in Akan”, 2005.]](http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_krv9ubTaWZ1qznraho1_500.png)
As my previous post suggests, today is a linguistics-and-LaTeX day for me. I’m writing about Akan, the language I “adopted” for study in my African linguistics class. The image above shows autosegmental derivations from the word /fʊnɔ/ (‘to be emaciated’) in three dialects of Akan. Depending on the dialect, /fɔnʊ/ can be realized as [fɔ̃n], [fɔ̃ŋ] or [fɔ̃ʊ̃]. The sound changes at work in these words are fairly simple but the dialectal divergence and variety here is kind of nuts. [Data via E. N. Abakah, “Phonological analysis of word-final consonants in Akan”, 2005.]
Once I found out that it’s going to cost me just as much to take four classes as it would to take five, I enrolled in Introduction to African Linguistics. The class promises to be a snoozefest as a linguistics primer, but the fun part is that we have to adopt a language, study it and report on it over the course of the semester. I asked the instructor what language has a tone system with lots of word-level phonology—I want to see some crazy awesome phonology—and he suggested Akan, a family of languages spoken in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.
The above data comes from the Twi language, and I would like to call attention to the (apparent) minimal pair /dʑa/ ‘leave behind’ and /dʑɥa/ ‘peel’. The initial consonant on both of these words is a voiced palatal affricate (compare to English “j” in judge), but the second is differentiated by the labiopalatal approximate (so imagine rounding your lips and bringing your tongue closer to your hard palate while making the “j” sound). As far as I can tell (I have yet to view a real grammar of the language), these are contrastive phonemes—which is really cool! Imagine if lip-rounding made a difference in English, imagine having two “ch” and two “j” sounds, all four as distinct as /p/, /b/, /t/ and /d/—that’d be neat!
(Also, props to the careful reader who notices the nasal assimilation and coalescence/gemination in the second column.)
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My name is Tristan. I'm a linguist turned speech pathology graduate student. I live in Madison, WI.
