Talk:Sereer Grammar
This is the talk page for the Bari Grammar. The talk page is simply another wiki page, but one where you can speak freely about or comment on the contents of the main page without adding a bunch of "stuff" to the grammar itself.
Phonology
There's probably justification to add a row for prenasalized voiced stops. Also, we haven't seen any evidence that i and ɪ, or u and ʊ, are contrastive. Might be a short/long alternation. Jevon 16:57, 21 September 2012 (UTC)
We sure have a lot of attested stops, but not a lot of minimal pairs for homorganic stops with the same voicing. How sure are we that, for instance, the implosive voiceless stops aren't simply how voiceless stops are realized in Serer? Our informant speaks multiple languages, so he would presumably be sensitive to interlanguage articulatory distinctions; perhaps there are fewer intralanguage distinctions. Jevon 15:40, 24 September 2012 (UTC)
- For one thing, the "voiceless" implosive stops are only voiceless word-initially, at least as we've been reckoning them. Intervocalically, they seem to consist of a glottal closure followed by a normally voiced (if extra-creaky) implosive. It's not very likely that they're underlyingly voiced, if we assume that the "tense" initial and final stops and the intervocalic glottal+implosive stops are the same thing.
- Secondly, I don't think it's the case that our consultant is especially sensitive to articulatory distinctions of the sort we're concerned with right now, because it is highly unlikely that a linguistically naive person would be able to tell you the differences among the various stop phonations we've encountered so far (his characterization of all of these, as well as the uvular fricative~[h] segment, is to point at his larynx). I'm not sure what multilingualism would do to help him/us on this count: just because I took French for six years doesn't mean that I intuitively understood what the difference between French voiced stops and English voiced stops was (nor did I actually produce them differently until the last year or so). It's also a bit unrealistic to expect him to be able to gauge our mimicry of his stops: hearing a production as close enough to his norm of production on acoustic grounds is one thing, but actually agreeing with our productions when and **only** when we make them exactly like we do is a task that I don't think we can expect anyone to perform better than chance at. Faytak 01:35, 25 September 2012 (UTC)
Tricky Sounds
Kelsey and I have been having a really hard time trying to figure out what our spectrograms mean for stops (ejectives and implosives in particular). What are the hallmarks of an ejective stop vs. a regular stop vs. an implosive stop? We have noticed that a lot many of the things that we have been writing as implosives have creaky vowels. Is this something particularly associated with implosives? But we have examples of creaky vowels accompanying non-implosive stops. Similarly for what we have been calling "tense" stops, is the double release of ejectives what we should be associating with these sounds? What cues have you all been taking to make these decisions?--Mel 03:59, 21 September 2012 (UTC)
- Implosives are glottalized segments, so creakiness around them is expected. The "tense" stops don't seem to have the double release characteristic of some ejectives, but rather a simultaneous release of both the laryngeal constriction (whatever it is) and the supralaryngeal constriction. These could be a voiceless analogue of the implosives. It's not implausible that a voiceless implosive could exist, since a lack of vocal fold vibrations and a downward movement of the glottis aren't antagonistic. This would sound a lot like an ejective, though, and we can't actually tell whether we're hearing "ejectives" or "reverse implosives" or whatever else until we take some aerodynamic measurements of them. I might try this in a crude way with my next individual session. Faytak 01:11, 25 September 2012 (UTC)
- To ID these stops, I have been looking for more intense voicing in the closure of the stop. This happens regardless of the implosive (?) type when the stop is intervocalic. Intervocalically, the key cue is actually that the "voiceless" ones have a very noticeable glottal stop, and so a period of voicelessness, before the voicing begins, but this voicing is still pretty intense. Word-initially and -finally, it's a lot harder, but "tenseness" of the stop seems to be the cue I've been using (whatever "tenseness" actually means at this point is lost on me, too). Faytak 01:11, 25 September 2012 (UTC)
Morphology
This is where morphology talk should go.
