Lámeyi languages: Difference between revisions

The smallest group, consisting of a single languages – '''Las''' – is the most conservative branch, preserving many old feature. It used to be classified as a distant Peripheral Khad language, because it palatalises both ''*kʲ'' and ''*tʲ'', which it shares with the Khad languages. It merges both sounds into a single phoneme /c/ (which some Peripheral Khad languages do). A unique feature of Las is lack of a phoneme /p/ and word-initial [[w:Fortition|fortition]] and a simple [[w:Pitch accent language|pitch-accent system]] not unlike the pitch accent in the Thadpalmé language. There are two pitches: "high" or "marked" and "low" or "unmarked". For example: ''kwhó'' [kʷʰóː] “fire”, ''akwho'' [ɑ.kʷʰo] “find it”. There are two dialects of Las that are mutually intelligible with one another, typically called the '''R-dialect''' and the '''L-dialect''', since the reflex of *l (and its coarticulated variations) in Proto-Lámeyi is used for their classification (the L-dialect only has [l], while the R-dialect only has [ɾ]). Transitional dialects tend to have [ɺ] instead. For instance: the word for “land” is ''qala'' in the L-dialect, ''qara'' in the R-dialect and in the transitional areas it is [ˈqɑ.ɺɑ] or [ˈqɔɺɔ]. Common to the R-dialect languages is a particularly widespread lenition of the stops *p, *t, *k and *q. Their spirantization generally occurs in the word-initial position with both *p and *q becoming [h] word-initially.