Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1. How do the following sets of sounds differ from each other? For
example: set 1 contains bilabial sounds; set 2 contains labiodental
sounds.
Thus, it could be assumed that the phoneme /x/ is more common with
singular nouns and whilst phoneme /ç/ is more common when used
as an adverb or plural and that they are both allophones of the same
vowel. Nonetheless, as Wiese mentioned, the two German fricatives
/x/ and /ç/ is a “classical (but much debated) example of an
allophonic relationship” (2000; pg. 16).
There are only 5 vowels in Shona (/a/ /e/ /i/ /o/ /u/) and long vowel
sounds, such as /i:/, /a:/, etc are not present and vowel length is
reduced and epenthetic vowels are inserted when loanwords are used
in Shona. Furthermore, as observed by Uffmann, there is “strict CV-
syllable structure and five vowels” (2002). This is compared to 25
English vowels.
(b) There are many epenthetic (inserted) vowels. What do they tell us
about possible syllable structures in Shona? More precisely, what
kinds of structures are disallowed in Shona?