Primarily in
Austroasiatic languages
The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. These languages are scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China and are t ...
(also known as Mon–Khmer), in a typical word a minor syllable is a reduced (minor)
syllable followed by a full tonic or stressed syllable. The minor syllable may be of the form or , with a
reduced vowel, as in colloquial
Khmer, or of the form with no vowel at all, as in
Mlabri Mlabri can refer to:
* Mlabri people
The Mlabri ( Thai: มลาบรี) or Mrabri are an ethnic group of Thailand and Laos, and have been called "the most interesting and least understood people in Southeast Asia". Only about 400 or fewer Mlab ...
"navel" (minor syllable ) and "underneath" (minor syllable ), and
Khasi "rule" (minor syllable ), ''syrwet'' "sign" (minor syllable ), "transform" (minor syllable ), "seed" (minor syllable ) and ''tyngkai'' "conserve" (minor syllable ). This
iambic pattern is sometimes called sesquisyllabic (lit. 'one and a half syllables'), a term coined by the American linguist
James Matisoff
James Alan Matisoff ( zh, , t=馬蒂索夫, s=马蒂索夫, p=Mǎdìsuǒfū or zh, , t=馬提索夫, s=马提索夫, p=Mǎtísuǒfū; born July 14, 1937) is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a no ...
in 1973 (Matisoff 1973:86).
Sometimes minor syllables are introduced by language contact. Many
Chamic languages as well as
Burmese have developed minor syllables from contact with Mon-Khmer family. In Burmese, minor syllables have the form , with no
consonant cluster
In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...
s allowed in the
syllable onset, no
syllable coda, and no
tone.
Recent reconstructions of
Proto-Tai
Proto-Tai is the reconstructed proto-language (common ancestor) of all the Tai languages, including modern Lao, Shan, Tai Lü, Tai Dam, Ahom, Northern Thai, Standard Thai, Bouyei, and Zhuang. The Proto-Tai language is not directly atteste ...
and
Old Chinese
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 ...
also include sesquisyllabic roots with minor syllables, as transitional forms between fully disyllabic words and the monosyllabic words found in modern
Tai languages
The Tai or Zhuang–Tai languages ( th, ภาษาไท or , transliteration: or ) are a branch of the Kra–Dai language family. The Tai languages include the most widely spoken of the Tai–Kadai languages, including Standard Thai or Si ...
and modern
Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...
.
See also
*
Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area
The Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area is a sprachbund including languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao), Kra–Dai, Austronesian and Austroasiatic families spoken in an area stretching from Thailand to China. Neighbou ...
*
Stress in Khmer
Notes
References
*Brunelle, Marc; Kirby, James; Michaud, Alexis; Watkins, Justin. (2017)
Prosodic systems: Mainland Southeast Asia HAL 01617182.
*Butler, Becky Ann. (2014). ''Deconstructing the Southeast Asian sesquisyllable: A gestural account (Doctoral dissertation)''. Cornell University.
*Ferlus, Michel. (2004)
The origin of tones in Viet-Muong In ''Papers from the Eleventh Annual Conference of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society'' (pp. 297–313). HAL 00927222v2.
*Ferlus, Michel. (2009)
What were the four Divisions of Middle Chinese? ''Diachronica, 26''(2), 184-213. HAL 01581138v2.
*
Matisoff, James A. (1973). 'Tonogenesis in Southeast Asia'. In Larry M. Hyman (ed.)
''Consonant Types and Tone''(Southern California Occasional Papers in Linguistics No. 1), pp. 73–95. Los Angeles: Linguistics Program, University of Southern California.
*Kirby, James & Brunelle, Marc. (2017). Southeast Asian tone in areal perspective. In R. Hickey (Ed.), ''The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics'' (pp. 703–731).
*Michaud, Alexis. (2012)
Monosyllabicization: patterns of evolution in Asian languages In ''Monosyllables: From phonology to typology'' (pp. 115–130). HAL 00436432v3.
*Svantesson, J.-O. & Karlsson, A. M. (2004)
Minor syllable tones in Kammu In ''International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2004)''.
* Thomas, David (1992)
'On Sesquisyllabic Structure' ''The Mon-Khmer Studies Journal'', 21, pp. 206–210.
Phonetics
{{phonetics-stub