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Meskangela: Difference between revisions
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The aspirated consonant series likely developed from certain consonant clusters in Proto-Meskangela. Classical Meskangela allows very few initial consonant clusters, which may be expained by their merging into single consonants, thus making the aspiration contrast phonemic. The Inner Eastern dialect later lost this distinction, instead adding a high tone contrast to following vowels. Although a full set of aspirated consonants is shown in the table above, it was likely that some of these phonemes were marginal, appearing only in few words or under exceptional conditions. Certain morphological alternations gave rise to a contrast between plain and aspirated series (as well as voiced-voiceless contrast in the approximant series), but most dialects lost this feature mostly due to later morphological levelling and analogy. | The aspirated consonant series likely developed from certain consonant clusters in Proto-Meskangela. Classical Meskangela allows very few initial consonant clusters, which may be expained by their merging into single consonants, thus making the aspiration contrast phonemic. The Inner Eastern dialect later lost this distinction, instead adding a high tone contrast to following vowels. Although a full set of aspirated consonants is shown in the table above, it was likely that some of these phonemes were marginal, appearing only in few words or under exceptional conditions. Certain morphological alternations gave rise to a contrast between plain and aspirated series (as well as voiced-voiceless contrast in the approximant series), but most dialects lost this feature mostly due to later morphological levelling and analogy. | ||
Palatalised and labialised consonsonants were separate phonemes in Classical Meskangela, but the Western dialects lost the former series and most Eastern and Southern dialects lost the latter. Dental and alveolar consonants likely both had palatalised counterparts, although these two series merged in Classical Meskangela. The Western dialects, however, retain the distinction: ''tik'' ("one") compared to Eastern and Classical ''cyik''. | |||
===Prosody=== | ===Prosody=== | ||