Tübatulabal phonology

Segmental phonology

Vowels

There are six phonemic vowels in Tübatulabal:

	Front	Central	Back
High	i	ɨ	u
Mid	e		ɔ
Low	æ	a	ɒ

Contrastive short and long versions of each vowel are found in both stressed and unstressed syllables. The vowels have various allophones which occur in different environments, most notably more central lax allophones when the vowels are short and occur in unstressed syllables. i and u can occur as the second member of a diphthong with any other vowel, resulting in ten possible diphthongs (Voegelin reports that ɨu is rare). Phonologically, the members of a diphthong are treated as distinct segments. For example, the common initial reduplication process, which copies the first stem vowel, copies only the first member of a diphthong, e.g.:

ʔuinul 'the sucker fish'

ʔuʔuinul 'the many suckers in one place'

Vowel length is contrastive. However, according to (Jensen 1973), in the suffixing morphology length is typically predictable. In most cases, the first suffix is short, the second suffix is long, the third suffix is short, and so on. For example, the verbal stem tɨk- 'to eat' can be expanded to tɨk-ilɔːɡ-ɔ-maːla 'let us go and pretend to eat'. In this word, each suffix alternates in length compared to its neighbors. When arranged differently, the same suffixes will have different lengths. Thus compare maːla 'let us' with the realization of the same morpheme in tɨk-al-aː-mala 'let us go eat'.

Tübatulabal consonants show a basic voicing distinction, with a corresponding alternately voiced phoneme present for almost every obstruent. Unlike English, Tübatulabal voiceless consonants are not aspirated.

Non-contrastive allophones of all vowels occur, usually when a vowel follows a nasal consonant, and especially when it also precedes a glottal consonant.

Consonants

		Labial	Alveolar		Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal		m	n			ŋ
Plosive	voiceless	p	t	ts	tʃ	k	ʔ
	voiced	b	d	dz	dʒ	ɡ
Fricative		f			ʃ	x	h
Approximant		ʋ	ɹ		j	w
Lateral			l		ʎ	ʟ

All consonants except the glottal stop can occur as geminates. Gemination is often phonologically predictable. In particular, all consonants except the voiced stops and the glottal stop geminate when following a short vowel. All stops and affricates are geminated in word-final position, regardless of the length of the preceding vowel.

Prosody

Tübatulabal has predictable word stress, which is tied to morphological constituency and syllable weight. Primary stress falls on the final syllable of the stem. Secondary stress is assigned right to left from the final syllable, falling on every other mora:

ˌʔɨmbɨŋˌwibaˈʔat "he is wanting to roll string on his thigh"

ˌjuːuˌduːˌjuːuˈdat "the fruit is mashing"

Words with the form VːCVCV will be stressed as ˌVːCVˈCV:

ˌnaːwiˈʃul "the pine-nut pole"

For the purposes of stress assignment, two identical short vowels that are separated only by a glottal stop are treated as a single vowel if and only if they belong to the same morpheme:

ˌkuʔud͡ʒuˈbil "the little one"

External links

• Tübatulabal language