Vowels[]
The vowel system is very simple, with four vowels.[1]
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | ɨ | u |
| Mid | e | ə | o |
| Open | a | ä | ɒ |
Consonants[]
Murrinh-Patha has a “long and flat” array of consonants like most Australian Aboriginal phonologies,[2] with six places of articulation (bilabial, lamino-dental, alveolar, post-alveolar retroflex, palatal and velar), but only a limited range of contrastive manners of articulation. There are oral obstruents and nasal stops at all points of articulation; however there are no phonemic fricatives.[3]
The consonant table uses the orthography used by researchers, as opposed to the one used most often by the community. The orthography used by the speaker community differs from the research orthography in that it represents dentals and palatals the same way, both ending with an 'h,' while the research orthography uses 'j' ('y' for nasals) to end palatals and 'h' to end dentals.
| Bilabial | Dental | Alveolar | Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop | voiceless | p | th /t̪/ | t | rt /ʈ/ | tj /c/ | k |
| voiced | b | dh /d̪/ | d | rd /ɖ/ | (dj /ɟ/) | g | |
| Stop | voiceless | f /ɸ/ | q /θ/ | s | rs /ʂ/ | c /ç/ | x |
| voiced | v /β/ | ð /ð/ | z | rz /ʐ/ | j /ʝ/ | ɣ | |
| Nasal | m | n | rn /ɳ/ | ny /ɲ/ | ng /ŋ/ | ||
| Approximant | plain | w | r /ɻ/ | y /j/ | h /ɰ/ | ||
| lateral | l | rl /ɭ/ | lh /ʟ/ | ||||
| Trill | rv /ʙ/ | rr /r/ | |||||
/ɟ/ is a marginal phoneme. The dental nasal /n̪/ is an allophone of the palatal nasal /ɲ/.
References[]
- ↑ Street, C. and Mollinjin G.P. The phonology of Murinbata. Work Papers of SIL-AAB, Series A, Volume 5. 1981
- ↑ Butcher, A. Australian Aboriginal languages: consonant-salient phonologies and the "place-of-articulation imperative". In Speech production: Models, phonetic processes and techniques, New York: Psychology Press, 2006.
- ↑ Mansfield, J. Polysynthetic sociolinguistics: the language and culture of Murrinh Patha Youth. Unpublished PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2014.