| 1.8.
Colouring of Mannerism: |
| In order to sum up
some of the phonetic peculiarities of Mundari vowels and consonants
in predictable situations, the phenomenon of colouring or mannerism
with vowels and consonants is discussed here. |
| Colouring
of vowel is possible in the following situations in Munari: |
| (i)
A vowel may be nasalized either incidentally or expressly as detialed
in § 1.5. |
| (ii)
It may have breath-colouring or aspirated release in cases of address
or emphasis as in ‘eh!’ or ‘ļuh’
[go!] in final positions. |
| (iii)
The vowels preceding [?] or the checked [?b] and [?d] are short, tense
and stressed. It is due to the abrupt checking that follows the vowels.
Morphophonemically, sequencing of two syllabic vowels is marked by
interrupting checking, in which case the preceding vowel appears to
be coloured by glottalization. |
| It is
possible that more than one colouring features may occur simultaneously.
Sometimes an h-sound may be replaced by pre-aspiration of the succeeding
vowel, as in ‘he! mar!’. |
| With
consonants, the following two types of complex situations may be discovered: |
| (i)
The unvoiced stops occcurring medially before any other consonant
have a vocalic release. Such a vowel is very lax in pronunciation
and is of very short duration. However , such a vocalic release is
optional. Distributionally [cv] does not contrast with
[c] in this situation. This vocalic can be regarded as a manner vocoid. |
| (ii)
In final and preconsonantal position, [b] and [d] are pre-glottalized.
This is also a colouring because cluster inter-pretation of [?] with
[b] and [d] is not possible for the simplefact that in no other case
there is a consonant cluster in word finals. These pre-glottalized
sounds are complex sounds. |
| The
phonemic length of vowels interpreted as cluster of identical vowels: |
| While
giving the list of the contrasting situations in 1.2.4. it was demonstrated
that short and long vowels contrast in C-C situations. The long vowel
also occurs initially and is found to contrast with short one. |
| Now,
one interpretation can be to include five long vowels in the phonemic
stock. This is improbable due to their being in restricted distribution.
The next solution is to set up a separate phoneme of length. But we
also find that in this langauge length occurs in varying degrees (§1.1.6), and hence it will be quite arbitrary to select one
particular length as phonemic and then to set up a number a allophonic
variations. |
| Within
the structural permissiveness of the language it is always better
to expand the scope of distribution of existing phonemes than to set
up another phoneme. Hence, [a:] etc., may be interpreted as [aa] etc.
This also helps in filling up the gap in vocalic compounds, i,e.,
if /a/ is compounded with /e/ , /i/, /o/, /u/ it is therefore, also
compounded with itself. |
| It will
be further seen in § 2.5.1.1. dealing with transitive
stem formation that reduplicating of the same vowel and thus using
a long counterpart is itself a process for the purpose. |
| 1.10.
Vocalic Clusters. |
| 1.10.1.
Cluster of two vowels: |
| Any
two vowels, with very few restrictions to be indicated below, can
occur in Mundari side by side. The two together may or may not form
a diphthong. Most of them occur in all the threepositions. Here, the
particular combinations are being tabulated below seperately for all
the three positions. Illustrations are in broad phonetic transcription. |
