Avatime, also known as Afatime, Sideme, or Sia, is a

Kwa language The Kwa languages, often specified as New Kwa, are a proposed but as-yet-undemonstrated family of languages spoken in the south-eastern part of Ivory Coast, across southern Ghana, and in central Togo. The name was introduced 1895 by Gottlob Kra ...

of the Avatime (self designation: Kedone (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 In phonetics, advanced tongue root (ATR) and retracted tongue root (RTR) are contrasting states of the root of the tongue during the pronunciation of vowels in some languages, especially in Western and Eastern Africa, but also in Kazakh and Mong ...

(laryngeal contraction), as in so many languages of Ghana, or of

vowel height A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...

: different phonetic parameters support different analyses.Since the

IPA IPA commonly refers to: * India pale ale, a style of beer * International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation * Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound IPA may also refer to: Organizations International * Insolvency Practitioners ...

does not have distinct letters for ±ATR vowels, they are transcribed here as differing in height for legibility. Avatime has

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is an Assimilation (linguistics), assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is t ...

. 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 "boat". The language has been claimed to have

doubly articulated Doubly articulated consonants are consonants with two simultaneous primary places of articulation of the same manner (both plosive, or both nasal, etc.). They are a subset of co-articulated consonants. They are to be distinguished from co-articul ...

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 closer to . 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 Coronals are consonants articulated with the flexible front part of the tongue. Among places of articulation, only the coronal consonants can be divided into as many articulation types: apical (using the tip of the tongue), laminal (using the bla ...

, 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 phonetics and phonology, a semivowel, glide or semiconsonant is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary, rather than as the nucleus of a syllable. Examples of semivowels in English are the ...

. In the latter case, the four

front vowel A front vowel is a class of vowel sounds used in some spoken languages, its defining characteristic being that the highest point of the tongue is positioned as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would otherw ...

s 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 .

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

Phonotactics

Notes

External links

References