Phonology

Consonants

The Western Pantar consonant inventory includes: voiced and voiceless stops /p t k '/ and /b d g/; voiceless fricatives /s h/; nasals /n m ng/; trill /r/ and lateral /l/; and glides/w/ and /y/.

Stops

The stop inventory includes both voiceless and voiced plosives at the bilabial, alveolar, and velar places of articulation. (See below for discussion of the glottal stop.) The voiceless fricatives lack any significant aspiration. Voice onset time is close to zero for word-initial voiceless stops. In intervocalic position more aspiration may be present with voiceless fricatives. Indeed, the spectrogram of atu 'four' below shows a voice onset time of 19 ms, compared with a closure duration of 113 ms.

Spectrogram of atu 'four'

Voicing contrasts in stops are illustrated in the following examples.

Place of articulation contrasts in stops are indicated in the follow examples.

With only a few exceptions, stops are limited to initial and medial positions. Exceptions to this distributional pattern are of two basic types: borrowings and contractions. Borrowings include hap 'fish' (perhaps from neighboring Nedebang; compare the native form ke'e) and sanlak 'thousand'. Contractions include the enclitic allomorph –b of the relativizing particle ba, as in hinani-b ganiaka? 'what is it that you saw?'.

Fricative /s/

The fricative /s/ is a voiceless alveolar fricative and is the only true fricative in the WP consonant inventory. The fricative /h/ is found only word-initially, indicating weak vowels (see below). The fricative /s/ occurs in all positions.

Nasal consonants

The bilabial nasal /m/ occurs word-finally only as the enclitic allomorph of the locative postposition me.

/bla me/ [blam] ‘at the house’

The alveolar nasal /n/ is limited to word-initial and medial positions with two exceptions, as follows.

In initial and medial positions /m/ and /n/ contrast.

The velar nasal is limited to final position, and with the exception of those situations just described it is the only nasal which can occur in final position.

The bilabial and alveolar nasals can also occur geminate in medial position.

Liquids /r/ and /l/

The liquids /r/ and /l/ occur in initial, medial, and final positions. In initial position the rhotic /r/ is often pronounced as a trill and preceded by a low vowel. In non-initial position /r/ is pronounced as [r].

/ra/	[ara] 	‘fire’
/ara/	[ʔara]	‘large’
/hara/	[hara]	‘ember’	

In all positions /r/ and /l/ contrast phonemically.

Word final /l/ is much more common in the Lamma dialect than in the other dialects.

Approximants /w/ and /y/

/y/ is phonetically a voiced palatal approximant [j], though it may sometimes be slightly to heavily affricated as [dʒ], especially in the Mauta dialect.

Glottal consonants /h/ and /ʔ/

The glottal fricative /h/ occurs only in morpheme-initial position preceding a vowel. Vowels preceded by /h/ are sometimes referred to as "weak" vowels (see below), as the phoneme /h/ is very lightly articulated. Word-initial vowels which are not preceded by /h/ are pronounced with a preceding glottal stop. This gives rise to a contrast between /h/ and /Ø/ (zero) in word-initial position.

Vowel-initial forms (i.e., Ø-initial) are pronounced with a glottal stop.

/ai/  ['ai]  'louse'

Root-initial /h/ may be elided in prefixed forms.

/na-haggi/   [na:ggi]  'I take'

and this root-initial /h/ is generally not written in bound roots. Thus, -ung 'head' and -ule 'neck' are both written with initial vowel, even though the latter actually begins with /h/. That this is the case is clear in the affixed forms, na'ung 'my head' and naule 'my neck'.

Evidence such as the above might argue in favor of an alternate analysis in which the forms here analyzed as vowel-initial and h-initial are reanalyzed as glottal-initial and Ø-initial, respectively. Such a system was proposed to speakers in October 2006, with a favorable reception. However, two factors argue against this analysis, at least for a practical orthography. First, speakers actually perceive an /h/ in the forms written here with h-initial, even though this /h/ may elide in casual speech. Second, there are regular correspondences between WP h-initial forms and cognate forms in other Alor-Pantar languages.

Geminate consonants

Consonants /p t k b d g s m n l/ contrast in length with longer counterparts /pp tt kk bb dd gg ss mm nn ll/.

Gemination is also an active morpho-phonological process. The perfect prefix i triggers gemination of stem-initial consonants when it occurs immediately preceding a short verb stem. A short verb stem is one which consists of a single open syllable. This process is at least in part morphologically conditioned, as not all i- preceding a short verb stem trigger such gemination. For example, the vowel of the first person exclusive plural ni does not trigger gemination.

hoang	nipia
hoang	ni-pia
beach	1PL:EXC-descend
'I am descending to the beach'

hoang	nippia
hoang	n-i-pia
beach	1SG-PERF-descend
'I have descended to the beach'

Vowels

The vowels are here analyzed as a five vowel system, having approximately cardinal values. The following examples illustrate this contrast.

/bi/	[bi]	‘k.o. drum’
/be/	[be]	‘shadow’
/ba/	[ba]	relativizing particle
/bo/	[bo] 	‘ocean wave’
/bu/ 	[bu] 	‘areca nut’

The vowel /a/ varies in value between [a] and [ɐ], apparantly without contrast.

/was/  [wɐs]  'sun'
/ara/  ['ara]    'large'

The vowel /e/ varies in value between [e] and [ɛ], apparantly without contrast.

/bes/  [bɛs]   'papaya'
/heko/  [heko]   'or'

Vowel sequences and diphthongs

Both vowel sequences and diphthongs occur. Vowel sequences consist of two separately articulated vowels, written with a glottal stop (apostrophe) between. The following table illustrates possible vowel sequences and diphthongs. Where no form is listed, the corresponding sequence or diphthong does not occur.

Forms referred to here as vowel sequences are not true sequences, as they actually consist of two vowels separated by a phonemic glottal stop. However, this glottal stop is often elided in casual speech leading to potential contrast between vowel sequences and diphthongs.

Diphthongs may occur as part of a vowel sequence, for example, ba'ai 'drink'.

Syllable structure

Most apparent initial consonant clusters are actually broken up by an unstressed vowel in careful speech. These have been here analyzed as CVC sequences, as below.

/balá/	[bla] ~ [bEla]		'house'
/bawá/	[bwa] ~ [bEwa] 	'large'
/baká/	[bka] ~ [bEka]	'maybe'

This approach has the admitted disadvantage of requiring the overt specification of lexical stress (in this case ultimate) on the above examples. An approach grounded in epenthesis might thus be better.

Clusters with /r/ are true clusters and are not broken up by epenthetic vowels even in careful speech. (6) /bro/ [bro] 'bro' /kro/ [kro] 'snot' /brai/ [brai] 'ringworm'

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation grant BCS-0408448 and an NSF/NEH Documenting Endangered Languages fellowship. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Last modified August 30, 2004 by Gary Holton at the University of Alaska Fairbanks

Cite this page:
Holton, Gary. 2004. Phonology. An Overview of Western Pantar.
Online: http://www.faculty.uaf.edu/ffgmh1/pantar/sounds.html