Avatime Language

Avatime, also known as Afatime, Sideme, or Sia, is a Kwa language of the Avatime (self designation: (m.sg.)) people of eastern Ghana. The Avatime live primarily in the seven towns and villages of Amedzofe, Vane, Gbadzeme, Dzokpe, Biakpa, Dzogbefeme, and Fume.

Phonology

Avatime is a tonal language with three tones, has vowel harmony, and has been claimed to have doubly articulated fricatives.

Vowels

Avatime has nine vowels, , though the vowels have been overlooked in most descriptions of the language. It is not clear if the difference between and is one of advanced and retracted tongue root (laryngeal contraction), as in so many languages of Ghana, or of vowel height: different phonetic parameters support different analyses.Since the IPA does not have distinct letters for ±ATR vowels, they are transcribed here as differing in height for legibility.

Avatime has vowel harmony. A root many not mix vowels of the relaxed and contracted sets, and prefixes change vowels to harmonize with the vowels of the root. For example, the human singular gender prefix is , and the human plural is : "thief", "father"; "thieves", "fathers"; also "bee" but "god".Tone not marked. Other prefixes vary as

Vowels may be long or short. Records from 1910 showed that all vowels could be nasalized, but that is disappearing, and few words with nasal vowels remained by the end of the century.

Consonants

is found in Ewe borrowings, as is , which can be seen to be distinct from (which cannot be followed by another consonant) in the loanword .

The language has been claimed to have doubly articulated fricatives . However, as with similar claims for Swedish , the labial articulation is not fricated, and these are actually labialized velars, . All velar fricatives are quite weak, and are more often .

The affricates vary between , and , , which may be a generational difference.

Phonotactics

Syllables are V, CV, CGV, and N: Avatime allows consonant-approximant clusters, where the approximant may be . There is also a syllabic nasal, which takes its own tone: "many".

Any consonant but may form a cluster with : "table", "snake", "chameleon", "mucous". After a coronal consonant, the is pronounced .

When two vowels come together, they are either separated by a glottal stop , fuse into a single vowel, or the first vowel reduces to a semivowel. In the latter case, the four front vowels reduce to and three of the back vowels reduce to , but is fronted to .

However, there are /Cw/ and /Cj/ sequences which are not derived from vowel sequences. These are .

Notes

References

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External links

The UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive: Avatime
- Phonetic fieldwork on Avatime

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Languages of Ghana
Ghana–Togo Mountain languages