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Meskangela: Difference between revisions
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Each dialect of Meskangela has its own distinctive pronunciation, and it would not be feasible here to go into all these properties. Classical Meskangela has 58 distinct phonemes, while Old Meskangela likely had up to 62 phonemes. All later dialects have smaller consonant inventories, but some have more vowel phonemes, than the Classical variety. | Each dialect of Meskangela has its own distinctive pronunciation, and it would not be feasible here to go into all these properties. Classical Meskangela has 58 distinct phonemes, while Old Meskangela likely had up to 62 phonemes. All later dialects have smaller consonant inventories, but some have more vowel phonemes, than the Classical variety. | ||
===Vowels=== | ===Vowels=== | ||
The table below represents vowels of Classical Meskangela: | |||
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center" | |||
|- | |||
! rowspan=2| | |||
! colspan=3| Short | |||
! colspan=3| Long | |||
|- | |||
! Front | |||
! Central | |||
! Back | |||
! Front | |||
! Central | |||
! Back | |||
|- | |||
! Close | |||
| i | |||
| | |||
| u | |||
| iː | |||
| | |||
| uː | |||
|- | |||
! Close-mid | |||
| eː | |||
| ɵː | |||
| oː | |||
|- | |||
! Open-mid | |||
| aɪ | |||
| | |||
| ɑʊ | |||
|- | |||
! Open | |||
| colspan=2| aː | |||
| ɑ(ː) | |||
|} | |||
The vowel [ɔ] was an allophone of short /a/ in open syllables. Whether it contrasted with the open vowels remains a matter of debate, however, in most later dialects it became a separate phoneme. The same is true for [ɑ(ː)], the quality of which is not certain, because it did not merge with [ɔ] in the Eastern group, but likely was short. The exact quality of Meskangela diphthongs is uncertain as well, "ai" remains a diphthong only in the far Western dialects, where it is refected as [eɪ] or [ɛɪ], while "au" becomes [øʏ] in the Outer and [ɶ] in the Inner Western dialects, so it could have been slightly fronted or centralised in the proto-language. | |||
The high long vowels are the most stable among the Meskangela dialects (with "ū" fronting to [y(ː)] only in the Inner Eastern variety), while the mid vowel group is the most variable. Eastern and Southern varieties exhibit [[w:Metaphony|metaphony]] affecting both short and long vowels to a different degree. The short vowels in the Southern dialect are frequently affected by syncope, thus creating new vowel contrasts. | |||
===Consonants=== | ===Consonants=== | ||
===Prosody=== | ===Prosody=== | ||