PROBLEMS OF PHONEMIC INTERPRETATION

. ,
N?%UIZED
SOUNDS IN YORUBA

I.

After an inquir: 17i G the phonemic status of the nasalized consonants ?, ti, j as
opposed to oral V, -! . . the great number of Yoruba nasalized vowels is inspected.
The expression tkct a certain oral vowel also occurs nasalized is shown to be
dangerous for a &H insight into a system of nasalized vowels. To establish the
number of n=alized vowel phonemes it is not enough to find minimal pairs in
which an oral vowel is contrasted with its nasalized variety; the point is to find
minimal pairs with mutually contrastive nasalized vowels. Thus Yoruba with its
7 oral vowel phonemes is shown to have not more than 4 nasalized ones. e

Of the several hundred languages spoken in West Africa, Yoruba is

one of the few on which fairly m&h research has been carried out and
on which there exist quite a number of publications. Apart from older
books such as the Rev. S. Crowthers Gummar a& Vocabulary of the
Yom&z Lmgwge (London 1852)and the Rev. T. J. Bowens Gvammar
ad Didiona~y of the Yomba Language (Washington 1958) and various
recent al-titles in linguistic journals, the three larger works of the
Yomba Language (Cambridge
ary Society, (third impression

more or less tentative tone

r more research on the phenomena described.
nt~bu~ion to +lusresearch is no exception in this
several questions still
Yon;lbalaad as it is
to compare her own
e with. these made by others, and from
on which it might be

people, living approximately in the

ks, and by newsreaders on the radio.

356

357
One of these points is the phonemic interpretation
of nasalized
soundis. There is a great variety of nasalized sounds in Yoruba
questil,n which of them are phonemic and to which phoneme a cxrtain
sound is to be assigned is not always easy to answer?)
Nasahzed Consonants
In lxr Introduction to the Yomba Langzlage, Ida Ward gives the
following lists of phonemes (pp. 6,12) :
Vozvels;: i, e, &:,a, 3, 0, u, 3, 5, 5, ti; written : i, e, e, a, I), 0, u, in, an, OR,
*
UT

3).

ConsoRiants(p. 19):b, t, d, k, g, kp (written p), gb, m, n, g (written n or

ng\, 1, r, f, s, J (written $), h, dj (written j), w, y, w, y (the last two

so netimes written 9220,~~~).
xevious paper 4) these lists and the pronunciation of the sounds
which
point

kre noteworthy
have been discussed in detail from a phonetic
CI f vie-w. The unusual
sound k$ has been dweit on at iarge there and,
to Wards statements and those of others, has been described
as botIi1 in- and explosive, its essential characteristic
being a certain
suction. Yoruba pronunciation,
therefore, will be touched upon in the
presenll paper only in as far as it gives rise to questions in the phokemic
field.
From a phonemic point of view the only di
able things in Wards
list of consonants are 6 and 9.5) There is a t
nasalized consonant,
zed initial consonant :
P. Exa:nples
of the three sets are: non-nas
9% [ri],
to see; ZQI [Iwo], to drag; yi [ji], to turn; nasalized initial
consonmt:
rirt
[:?I,
to laugh; ZQVZ[CS], to be dear; yin [ji], tolay
eggs ; ; ti with high tone.
Warrif readily assumes nasalized r to be the result of the neighbouring nasal vowel, adlding by way of reason for this explanation:
No
attemp, t has been made to z&e a nasalized Y . . . . (p. 23, italics BS).

2) I c we many thanks to Dr. Carl F. Hoffmann

for several stimulating dis-

cussions: and helpful suggestions regarding the problems dealt with in this paper.
3) Th P n is not sounded but serves merely as mark of nasalization of the
precedir .g vowel.
4) 33. Siertsema, Some Notes on Yomba Phoraetics arrd SpedZing, to appear in
Bulletin de Hnstitut IFranGaisdAfrique Noire, B, 1958. Further referred to as
YOY.Phm. ,a& Sp.
5) To1avoid confusion, Wards indication of the sound, y, is taken ov(:r. The
phonetill: symbol would be ul, i;hisis used in the transcriptions of whole words.

But for 8 and 9, often w&m (with preceding s), her treatment is
different and she raises an interesting problem: . . L . it is possible,
even probable, that they are weakened forms of the nasal consonants
3~ and by, the former a combination of q with the lip-rounding
belonging to v and the latter a pure palatal consonant. gw and tiy are
sounds common to many West African languages. The pronunciation
ny, i.e. the froht: Gf the tongue in contact with the hard palatt.e, was
found in one dialect (Ilesha) : it would be interesting to discover if it
ut the pronunciation GUY,
i.e. the back of the
occurs in any other.
tongue actuaJly touching the soft palate, was not found in any speaker.
The informants I have worked with require a strong nasalization of the
consonant from the very beginning of its articulation: this l$oints to the
probability of the consonantal origin of these nasalized semLvowels
. . . . (p. i3). The last sentence evidently means to say tha:t 5 anirl 5 are
to be looked upon as originally, and perhaps still so phonemically, two
more nasaks: the labialized velar one and the palatal one. Further on
this is specified: Considerably more research is necessary to settle the
question d the o~igis of the nasalized ZQ,y, r ar d their methods of
representation (p. 25, italics BS).
It is true that the representation of nasalized ze,and :j is not consistent : the two words [w3], they, them, their and [ii]) you, your
(~1.) may be written won, yin, in which the final a indicates nasal zation
of the whole group, dr ~wprt, @in, in which the first n -indicates the
nasalization of the consonant, the last that of the vowel. With [%6] the
spelling titian is often used to indicate the subject pronoun, wgrt for the
object and possessive pronoun, but there is no difference in pronunciAonn

The idea that the spelling nw, ny should indicate that these two
consonants are to be looked upon as nasak is at first sight rather
attractive. In view of the structure of the u:onsonant system there is
even much to be said in favour of it, for it would make the system more
regular with a nasal corresponding to each voiced plosive 6).Historically it is supported by Westermanns statement that k$ and gb have
) The ffj, spelled j, Ward puts in a class by itself called affkative.
Mowever,
Yoruba j is different from English [d3]. The fricative is very slight and often
is hardly heard. It seems appropriate to describe it as a $alatd fdxive - the
palatai
articulation (instead of palatoalveolar as in English [dj]) being clearly
audible.

359

developed out of kst and gti respectively 7). Thus the series of labiallized
velars, too, would originally have been perfectly re@ar : kw - p - p,
and tht.: present system would be:

b
d
.
dl
g:

kP

gb

m
n
J1

V
?9ur

In view of the structure of the syllable, however, i.e. regarding the

ocCurrt::n.ceof these consonants, this interpretation
would raise several
difficu ties.

Firs.ly, 6 [gw] and 9 [Jl] would be the only nasals occurring before
nasalized vowels olziy and-never before oral ones. If the nasalization of
the vo,Nel should be colnsidered as caused by the nasal consonant, tlhere
would be the inexplic:able situation that some of the nasals always
cau:se? nasalization of the following vowel whereas others did not: the
a ;q WWO, to spend money, the e in m&z, three, the o in 90 SWZ, I
shctll Edeep, are not nasaliried; but any vowel after ~8 and 9 shows
strong nasalization.
onsonant nasalized
Sect jndly, nasalized r would remain as the so
by a :Iallowing nasalized vowel. This would n
e impossible, the r *
being a very open consonant with little friction, into which a nasal
resomnce would be more likely to extend than in a narrow fricative
such GS, e.g., x. But such open consonants are 6 and 5 too. Whatever
may llave been their pronunciation
in former days, at present there is
no nazial here phone tically spe L:&mg*), as the tongue does not touch the
pa.latt,l with these sounds 9). As far as I am able to observe, apart from
the 1c:wered soft palate and uvula, the oral formation of [j] and [dj] is
exact ;y the same as that of [j] and [w].
In view of these facts and in spite of the loss of symm.etry in the
-7) I). Westermann, Die! Westlickeri Sudansfwachm und ihre Reziehungen zum
Baultzlc, 1927, pp. 8,9.

8) Ef there should be, VJBIwould still not be a true labio-velar nasal; at mast it
would be a Zabialized velar nasal, i.e. a velar nasal pronounced with lip-roundbing,
not with lip-cZos%ve.As it is, it is mostly a nasalized labio-velar semi-vowel, Le.
with :IOclosure either at the lips or at the velum.
9) At least not in Standard Yoruba (Cf. the quotation from Ward on p. 358
abovci:).

360

consonant system, the above considerations rather underline the conclusion arrived at before, that in Yoruba only m, 92 and y are nasal in
their own right : they occur both before nasalized vowels 10)and before
oral ones (see a,bove, p. 359) and naturally have so orn2 ~ariat~ts.
Nasalized w, y, r, on the contrary, occur only before nasalized vowels
and are thus ~nviGww&ally determind variants of oral w, y, r, which
*cur only before oral vowels. 11). Thus one might formulate the
pfi~nornenon ais d simple case of assimilation by stating that w, yJ r are
nasalized before nasalized vowels. No indication in the spelling, like the
present rczlv,ny, would be necessary and the phoneme inventory could
be reduced by three items 11)- or rather, seeing that Ward adopts the
above #explanation for nasatized r: by MO items.

D. Olmsted, in his study on The Phonemes of Yowba 12), states: All

vowels occur oral or nasalized (p. 2461, which would mean that
Yoruba had seven nasalized vowels. (See the list of phonemes above,
p. 357). Ida Ward has found only three. Though, she says, it has been
the custom to write four of these, viz. -in, -a~, -pn:, -un Isa), yet, with a
few exceptions in most of the dialects examined no difference in
pronunciation was made between written -an and -pn (p. 10). Cf.
Ibadasz: [ibad;] or [&adz]. Ward further remarks that -an tends to get
rounded after lip-consonants and is written -Qn in this position (agbpn,
wisdom [agb;ij), whereas the spelling -an is used after all other
consonants. She then goes on to suggest that one way of representing
-an and -pncould be adopted, in which it might be understood that a
rounder variety of vowel follows the lip-consonants (p. B 1).
The
situation in Standard Yoruba as regards nasalized vowels as it
has-been found by the present writer, agrees more with Wards description than with Olmsteds. But when the three factors of s@Zling,
sozc~s and ~Jwnemes are considered in their mutua,l relation, the matter
is more complicated than either of them shows.
10) Though not often; ina, fire and nines, in -are heard with nasalized final
vowel. .
II) Ym. Phm. and Sp.
12) WORD Vol. 7, 1951, p. 245-249.
lerjl See Note 3, p. 357.

361
S#kdling

and

Sounds

To begin with, the number of nasalized\ vowels that are regularly

written is n,ot four but five : -in, -en, -an, -gn, -tin: yin, you pl. ; yfm,
that; y&, to bite;: gb@z, to be wise; y&z, to cu:, saw. But these
Cve overlap in a cu.&us way in their pronunciation.
The lower tongue
position of 2and G as . .ampared with i and zi: has been mentioned by
Ward (p. 12). As to 3, I know of no case of a phonemic distinction
between zand Z, nor are thev distinguished in the spelling, as only -in
occurs. Actually there is io reason why one should consider this
phoneme as nasalized\ i; in view of t e lower tongue position -en would
probably have been the better spelling. A closer variety does occur, but
;a tongue position even lower than e is also often used which makes the
realization of this phoneme sound almost as [El].
Among the back vowels t*here is also a double overlapping. When
-c&noccurs after a velar sound, k, g and sometimes K@,gh, it is mostly
pronou:nced as the completely close syllabic velar nasal : gzin [g&J,
long; krin [kj], to fill; gbtin [gbj], to smite, in which the nasal
plosion is clearly audible. Before labial and alveolar consonants, :however, -un is pronounced as a vowel, but mostly with a lower tongue
position than kc.In ltbis position it may be said to fall together with
[a] and someCmes even with [3], so that e.g., ft ) to sow and f&, to
dig out may-be practically indistinguishable.
The reason why the
nasalized vowel in the first word is assigned to the phoneme G, that in
the second to 3, is that only opener variants are accepted by inform.ants
for the second word, whereas for ,the first they accept only closer and
more rouncled ones: fun may be [fu], [fa], rarely [fS], fpnmay be [f5],
[f;], but never [fo].
An interesting side-light on this overlapping is in many cases offered
by Olmsteds transcriptixis.
He worked with one Yoruba informant in
America, and is evidently not influenced by any traditional spelling of
the language. Thus he gives the following transcriptions:
yZ I?), that
(Yoruba spelling ypz, longer form tyiu,i); ~d3, grief (Yoruba spelling
edun) ; id& craving (Yoruba spelling idun) ; ikG, squirrel (Yoruba
spelling ikun) ; td :, far away (Yoruba spelling t$wz, with silent h) 14) ;
mgkeuefd, I write to you, in which the last syllable -fS represents two
13) The phonetic symbols Eand 3 are used by Qlmsted where Yoruba spelling
.
has p and 9.
14) The Phonemes of Yoruba, p. 246, 247.

362

words spelled in Yoruba: fw 9 toYOU

16).02tn uare not distinguish~
ed in the spelling, only -~9z occurs.
Actually there is no reason why one
should consider this phoneme as nasalized U; in view of the luwer
tongue position -OHwould probably have been t better spelling.
Then there is -as, which also has a variety of pronunciations. Sometimes it is pronounced [5], as Ward already pointed out (p. 10) la&);
sometimes it is [a] ; sometimes, too, it sounds more fronted, [a], or even
almost [%I. Of the words rang?, send; tan; finish; and kan, a certain
I have heard the first pronounced as [rZJe], the second as [t6], the third
as [k%]. Actually there is no reason why one should consider tbis
phoneme as nasalized a, although in view of the different realizations
-CUT.
is probably the best spelling.
Thus it is true that the seven vowels of Yoruba cczrcall be hewd ;s
nasalized vowels too, and in that sense can be said to occur nasalized
(Olmsted, quoted above, p. 360) : 2 spelled -an; 8 spelled -in; # spelled
-in, -+ti ; ii spelled -a%; 6 spelled -an, -9n; (rarely -un) ; 6 spelled -tirt
(rarely -on) and 6 spelled-zm. But in between these seven there is a wide
range of intermediate
nasalized vowels to be heard. in various
degrees of closeness. Schematically represented :
Sjhdling

souds

-an
--on
-un

Language Vol. 29, 1953, p. 160.

15a) Because : he sound mrlstly seems to be slightly more open than [S], I
wciuld prefer to mnder it by 161 in a narrow transcription. Considering the wide
range of closeness xhz sound can have, though, [3] is quite adkquate for a broad
trans&ption.

15) Comparative

Notes on Yowba and Lucumi,

363
In this amorphous mass of nasalized vowels, those whose tongue
position corresponds to or&lones (underlined in the scheme) tend to be
singled out as phnemes for no other reason than this purely phonetic
relationship. Thus Olmsted has readily found minimal pairs of words
differentiated by oral versus nasal vowel: e.g. /&/, liver - /E&/,
grief ; /idol, canax seed - /ids/, craving; /ikti/, death - /ikG/,
squimel leb). ut it would be difficult to discover minimal pairs in
which all Olmsteds nasal&d vowels are mutually contrasted and
distinctive, His no. 5, /:F/in /&dS/,grief, lzannot be contrasted with his
no. 6,161, in the same setting: /edi?/, nor with his no. 7, /a/ : /d3/, /a@,/ or
/&diiiiare variant pronunciations of the same word, spelled in Yontba
gdtm, grief.
In- view of all this it would be more realistic not to relate Yoruba
nasalized vowels to any of the oral ones and to refrain from the expression that a certain vowel occurs nasalized. In Yoruba the nasarized vowels form a class of phonemes by themselves in addition to the
seven oral vowels.
1

Phonemes
is simpler than one
From the phonemic point of view the mat
would expect from the complicated list of correspondences. A considleration of the nasalized vowe:Lphonemes leaves a system of comparatively simple structure.
Starting from the most obvious data, it can be established that the
spelling -2cn represents u WHWor Jess close back romded phoneme,
realized as [g] frequently after velar consonants, and as [ii] or [6], or in
fast speech sometimes [15],after labials and alveolars.
The spelling -Qn is superfluous. It occurs only after labials where it
represents the open phoneme, realized as the back rounded sound
after labial consonants, as [a] or [Zj after other consonants; with some
speakers still more fronted,as almost [%I after Y.The spelling -an co1
be uged in all cases to represent this phoneme.
The sound [Z], represented by -en occupies a peculiar place ationg
Yoruba nasalized vowels. It would be very convenient and it would
make the phoneme syst.em so much simpler if one could discard it, like
[5J# as a mere environmentally determined realization of the third
l

1Sb) The Phmemes of YtmbtZ, p. 246.

nasalized-vowel phoneme, the lmore 01less ,clt~sefro& w~owdtd

ore,
represented by 4~. And this would almost be possible too . . e but for
two words.
The spelling -gut occurs mainly in a few reduplication forms (or
former reduplication forms which no*whave a double vowel), of whi(zh
:no simplex seems to exist and where there are :no corresponding forms
-with -in with a different mfzaning. The words! in which it occurs are
practically all special adverbs, 5. :. adverbs which can only be us3
to qualify d particular adjective. For instance s#&B,
slightl-f,
which qualifies d&n, sweet, only; or tiypz, far off, which can only be
used l
tith ga, high, e.g. &ye na fo ga tdypzrere, the bird flies very hig:h
(lltt .- bird-the fly high far-off well). It also occurs in yf~J that,
where it is contrasted with
your.
Now yen and tiygn are the only cases in which the difference z/i is
distinctive &yin = yours), and even here the contrast does rot
depend on the vowels only, as the tones are different too. Out of the 21
words in which -pz occurs in the dictionaries 12 occur also with -in in
the same meaning, etiher in the same dictionary or in another, E. G.
$+?npf?lz,tightly, given in Delanos new Yoruba Dictionary ls) aiso
occws as pinpi~r a few pages further with almost the same example:
Ojo ti ile km ncc +zppz (meaning: Ojo shuts the door tightly, firmly) ;
A.+&ti ilebun yam re. jG@z (meaning: Ajai shuts the door of his room
l

y&J

firmly)

is not surprising: nasalized 5, as said before, 3:spronounced with

a lower tongue position than i, and -in often sounds like [i] or even
almost [5]. The pronunciatjon does not seem to depend on a particular
consonantal el,vironment, but further research on Us point is be ng
carried out. Yet in the two cases mentioned (yen - yin; Gyp - Gym),
where both forms of each pair are known and occur fairl!y frequenly,
informants insist on the difference in vowel. In other cazzs, the same
informant seems to know only one form of a word, either the one with
[i] or the one with [i], but by no means does he consistently recogrize
the ones with the same vowel and fail to recognize the ones with the
other vowel, SOit is not a dialectal difference. One informant insisted,
This

16) Unfortunately DelanQ gives no translations or descriptions of the meaning

in all cases. Sometimes the meaning has to be gathered from the context or f ;Drn
tile Yaru ba-English Dictionary of t.he Church Missionary Society.

365

e.g., on jg qgbinni, much, copious, with [i] ; jpzgbpzn~,

given by Delano
with the same meaning as the orJy word of the two, was quite wrong
he said. The same wasI the case with #+vz, given in the CMS Dictionary
for tremblingly. This word does not occur in Delanos lists at all,
neither with + nor with a;my informant would only accept ii);+z with
[i], which does not occur in either dictionary. On the other hand both
dictionaries give for smile; +rin mzcs+n witR no corresponding form
with -~Pz,and [rnus;J too, is the only form accepted by the informant.
Is one justified on these grounds to discard -en as superfluous from
the spelling and take [i] as a realization of the one and only na3alii:ed
front unrounded vowel phoneme represented by -in? It seems rather a
bold step but one could get along with a spelling without +n. Further
research would h.ave to reveal the determining factors for the occurrence of this sound when it is insisted on - it might, for instance, turn
out to be a spelling pronunciation in some cases.
In whatever wa.y we view the data, there is no doubt that [E] is not on
a level with the other nasalized vowel phonemes. If the instances of its
occurrence are considlered sufficient evidence to establish its phonemic
status and thus to justify the spelling -en, there is always the fact that
this [G]occurs mostly in a special class of very special words, frequently
of onomatopoeic character; which class of words, next to interjections,
may be expected to contain unusual sounds 1J).Yoruba [k] belongs to
1) The affinity with interjections and the onomatopoeic character of words
with [s] in Yoruba comes out in the fact that Yoruba people will say of many of
these words that Ithey have no meaning. Of coilrse they have a meaning,
which is at least that of either an intensifier (ppq!+n, see above) or a downtoner (slrrs@z,.xee;gbove), but which is often more, thwgh difficult to describe.
In these cases Del,anq contents himself with giving ai> example only, which
conveys nothing to a foreigner when he rt * ds it himself. As soon as txe example
is read by t native, however, the tnne of voice and the way the word is said
makes the meaning in the given context clear at once - a characteristic these
words have in common with interjections. E~czmpZ~(spelled with 4%) : Delano
has the following entry:: I%, adv. . . . . Ibustin na 19si isale fzn. The foreigner
translates: This bed goes to the floor . . . . fin ? -. and tol him it can mean
that either the bed is in the habit of breaking down and sagging TOthe floor or
that it goes down deeply, i.e. has a soft mattress. That the last is the real
meaning appears immediately from the long drawn-out vowel, the intonation,
tone of voice and facial expression of the native speaker as he pronounces the
word fin.

366
what Doke calls the etrt~a-grammaticapphonetics of onomatopoebr $8).
If asked, therefore, how many nasalized vowel phonemes there are in
Yoruba, one might venture, although at some risk, to suggest with
Ward that there are indeed only three. Considering the wide r
possible realizations for each of them, these phonemes could
safely indicated as:
f . a more - or less - &se front wwmmded cm,
2. :a more - or less - class back rounded one,
one,
2. a more - or lee - front (or back) O@VS
covering the ranges of tongue positions roughly T outlined in the scheme :

University College
Ibadan, Nigeria

B. SIERTSEMA

Doke, An Outbe of # Mwmarri

Bushman Phonetics, Bantu Studies
X, 1936,p. 440. In Dokes Study irt Lamba Phonetics (Bantu Studies III, X927),
the featureis treated in greaterdetail (p. 6 and esp. in part II, %xtra
Phonetics, p. 38 ff .). Among his examples are words used of jump
er, .,.,Iof light flashing (p. 38), ....I(of deep digging (p. 39) etc. and, naturally, many cries of animals.