| 2.1.0. Phonetic Correlates |
For the articulatory
description of cosonants we distinguished various articulators
along the lower margin of the oral cavity and various points
of articulation along the upper margin. A combination of articulators
and points of articulation constitutes a position of articultion.
Various obstructions in the flow of air current in the oral
passage were also distinguished. Thus, the terms bilabial, velar,
etc., refer to the speech sounds produced at various positions
of articulation; the terms stop, nasal,etc., refer to the sounds
produced by various obstructions in the flow of air current
in the oral passage. Likewise vowel articulations are described
in terms of lip position, tongue height and tongue advancement.
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The phonemic
system of the abujhmaria consists of twenty consonants and ten
vowels. The consonant system consists of (i) ten stops; bilabial,
dental, retroflex, palatal and velar stops with a distinctive
opposition of voice and voicelessnes at each point of articulation;
(ii) two fricatives; alveolar and glottal; (iii) one alveolar
lateral; (iv) one alveolar trill; (v) one retroflex flap; (vi)
three nasals: bilabial, dental and velar; and (vii) two semi-vowels:
bilabial and palatal semi-vowels. Voiced and voiceless oppostion
is distinctive only among stops. Stops are tense, i.e., they
are articulated with relatively strong force and muscular tension
in the initail position after an open juncture and are lax,
i.e., they are articulated with relatively weak force and tension
in the intervocalic position. The phonetic difference between
/r/ and / /
is in the number of apcial taps. All consonants except / /and
//
occur in the initial, medial and final positions of a word.
Consonants occurring in the word-final positions have an allophone
of a unreleased variety of their respective points of articulation.
Nasal /n/ has three allophones - a palatal [ñ] before
palatal stops, a retroflex nasal[ ]
before retroflex stops and a dental nasal[n] elsewhere.
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| Consonant Geminations |
All consonants,
except h, ,
and w, can occur as geminates in the medial posotion of a word
between two short vowels or between a short and a long Vowel.
These geminated consonants do contrast with the single consonants
in the same environment. Because of such contrasts, the geminated
consonants are written double in this work. The geminated consonants
which span morpheme boundaries are pronounced longer than those
geminated consonants that do not span morpheme boundaries. Here
gemination occurs due to certain morphological processes. Compare,
for expmple, /puna:/ �new� and /punno:/ �she does not know�,
(In the second example, the final nasal of the root pun-
is doubled before the following nagative suffix -o:).
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The vowel
system consists of five short and five long vowels. Short and
long refer to the duration required to produce the sound or
the length of time that the air stream is emitted. The quality
of the vowels is chiefly determined by whether the tongue is
high in the mouth, at midpoint in the mouth, or low. The tongue
in the articulation of vowels, may be in the front of the mouth,
in the central region of the mouth, or in the back. Thus, there
are two essential criteria or features, that we employed in
the description of vowels, one vertical (high, mid and low)
and the other horizontal (front, central and back).
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Vowels are also described
as rounded and unrounded keeping in view the position of the
lips during their articulation. The front and central vowels
are pronounced with the lips neutral or spread; they are unrounded
vowels. The back vowels are prounced with lip rounding or labialization,
i.e., with the lips pursed or protruded; they are rounded vowels.
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Short and long vowels do contrast
only in the initail and medial positions of a word and not in
the final position. The word-final vowel is always phonetically
half-long, i.e., when compared to those long vowels occurring
in the initial and medial positions of a word, the duration
of the word-final vowels is not that longer. Hence, word-final
vowels with half-length are treated allophones of the long vowels
occucuring elsewhere.
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In the articulation of long vowels the tongue position is slightly higher while for the short vowels it is slightly lowered.
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