[etnolinguistica] Re: Lenition in Northwest Ge

[Andres P Salanova]

Hello Dan:

Your message was forwarded to me, and I'm taking the liberty of forwarding
my answer to the etnolinguistica list, since I think this discussion
will be of interest there.

It makes me happy that someone is working on the phonology of Suyá, as
I've always had great curiosity for it. Please make your paper available
whenever it's ready.

You ask whether there's anything special about /k/ in the northern Je
languages. A couple of things come to mind. One thing that singles out /k/
from other voiceless stops is that in coda position it is not opposed to a
homorganic nasal in at least Mebengokre and Apinaye.

Another point about /k/ is made by Burgess & Ham in their 1968 article
about Apinaye. If I remember well, they say that it's inserted for
emphasis in words like ngryk, tyk, etc., rather than being part of the
lexeme. I don't know how valid an interpretation this is, but it is
true that /k/ in Apinaye has a peculiar behavior: whereas other coda
consonants are deleted before a homorganic stop in the following onset,
/k/ is deleted everywhere except before /r/.

About other processes of lenition, there's voicing of obstruents in
unstressed syllables in Apinaye, but nothing very similar to what you
describe.

One question I would like to ask is what the nature of the evidence is
for believing that the process in question is lenition rather than
fortition. If this were fortition, it would be quite unproblematic, right?

The facts are in fact quite striking, and I'm also surprised that so
many people report that things of the sort haven't been encountered
before. The consonantal mutations in languages such as Mende (which
are structure-preserving) were, at least for a while, _believed_ to be
post-lexical phonology (i.e., they were thought of as phonological
processes that applied at the edges of certain prosodic domains). I don't
know if this sort of thing is abundant, but in my mind the (ugly)
device of "precompiled allomorphy" was precisely to address that kind of
problem.

Best,
	Andres


There is a fascinating process of phrase-final lenition in Suya in which
t --> r and p --> w, both then followed by what Marymarcia calls, I
think, and 'echo vowel', a copy of the vowel immediately preceding the
lenited consonant. The special interest of the process is that k fails to
undergo it. Occasionally a phrase-final k will be marked by a retarded
voice onset time or even be pronounced as g. However, it generally just
surfaces as k in my data. Because r and w are phonemes of Suya, according
to my analysis, but Suya lacks any velar approximant phoneme, this is a
case of what Lexical Phonology (remember all those years ago?) called
Structure Preservation. However, it seems to be the first recorded case
of non-lexical Structure Preservation, thus representing a severe problem
for Lexical Phonology-type theories [...]

[...] (i) what the
Suya /k/ corresponds to in other Northwest Ge languages and (ii) whether
Lenition of this sort (phrase final on voiceless plosives) is found in
these languages. I *think* that there is nothing unusual about /k/ in
Northwest Ge, but am not sure. I do not think that other Ge languages
have this kind of Lenition either, but I could not assert categorically
that they do not.



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