Yɛmba or Yemba, also Yémba or Bamiléké Dschang, is a major
Bamileke language
The Bamileke languages ( bai, Bamiléké) are a group of Eastern Grassfields languages spoken by the Bamileke people in the Western High Plateau
The Western High Plateau, Western Highlands or Bamenda Grassfields is a region of Cameroon cha ...
of
Cameroon
Cameroon (; french: Cameroun, ff, Kamerun), officially the Republic of Cameroon (french: République du Cameroun, links=no), is a country in west-central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west and north; Chad to the northeast; the ...
. It was spoken by 300,000 or so people in the
West Region in 1992.
[
Despite originally being exclusively a spoken language, Yemba writing was developed by ]Maurice Tadadjeu Maurice Tadadjeu (1950-2012 in Cameroon) was a Vice-President of the African Union's Economic, Social and Cultural Council of Central Africa.
He was a co-creator of the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages in the late 1970s.
In 1996 he became F ...
(co-creator of the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages The General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages is an orthographic system created in the late 1970s for all Cameroonian languages. Consonant and vowel letters are not to contain diacritics, though is a temporary exception. The alphabet is not used suf ...
) and Steven Bird. Their team developed a small Yemba - French Dictionary covering French translations of over 3,000 Yemba words and expressions. The Yemba alphabet is a subset of the International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...
.
A machine backwards transformation of the dictionary was performed by independent scientists who created the French translation of Yemba words. The resulting dictionary was extended with French synonyms from the French version of the WordNet
WordNet is a lexical database of semantic relations between words in more than 200 languages. WordNet links words into semantic relations including synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. The synonyms are grouped into '' synsets'' with short defin ...
database. Furthermore, over 6,000 English, German, Czech, Spanish, Italian and Chinese words and expressions were translated into Yemba. A major outcome of this project is a collaborative online platform for extending Yemba translations and promoting Yemba learning.
Phonology
Consonants
* Sounds /t͡ʃ ʃ ʒ/ are included as phonemes in some analyses. In most analyses, they are considered as allophones of /t͡s s z/.
* Sounds l ɣare consonant alternation sounds between the following consonants /b d ɡ/.
* Alternation sounds of /j w/ are labialized and palatalized sounds ʲ ɡʷ
* Graphemes of the alterations and allophones ͡ʃ ʃ ʒ p lare noted in the Yemba alphabet as ''c sh j p l''.
*An /r/ sound can also be included in the current language, and written in the Yemba alphabet as ''r''.
* The prosodies if palatalization and labialization ʷ are written orthographically with lowercase graphemes ''y w''.
*A grapheme for aspiration among consonants is written as ''h''.
Vowels
* /ʉ/ is included as a phoneme in some analyses. In more abstract analyses, it is considered as a palatalization of /u/.
* Vowel length is distinguished using double vowel sounds (ex. aa ː
Tone
Three tones are marked as high mid or low Low tones are unmarked when written.
References
tp://ftp.cis.upenn.edu/pub/sb/papers/dictionary/dictionary.pdf Petit dictionnaire Yemba Francais
External links
Aleco Yemba.net - Online Dictionaries and Learning Tools for the Yemba Language
Languages of Cameroon
Bamileke languages
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