Table 3.1. Vowel qualities
Front Mid Back Close
i, [i•], i˘, i˘ u, [u8], u˘, u˘
Mid e, e˘, e˘
o, o˘, o˘ Open
a, a˘, a˘
All of the five qualities occur as short oral, long oral, and long nasal vowels. These fifteen vowels make up the phonemic vowel inventory of the language. In addition, there are two
voiceless oral vowels, i• and u8, which are allophones of i and u, respectively.
3.1 Oral vowels
3.1.1 Voiced vowels
The voiced oral vowels can be short or long. Vowel length is contrastive in the language, as shown in table 3.2:
Table 3.2. Examples of long and short oral vowels
a ame
to keep, raise a˘ a˘me
to break3m.sg.obj. a
ma to be sweet
a˘ ma˘ to be few
There is a partial relationship between tone and vowel length. Rising tones occur only on long vowels and low tones occur mainly on short vowels see section 4.1.
Long vowels are approximately 1.5 times longer than short vowels. Long vowels, in word-final position, may be drawn out and therefore can be slightly longer than long vowels in other word
positions.
3.1.2 Voiceless vowels
As noted by Elderkin 1989: 212, the short oral vowels i and u can be devoiced when they
are low toned and in morpheme-final position. Elderkin 1989: 38 also observed that voiceless vowels do not occur after
w, j, h and our data supports this finding. Table 3.3 illustrates the occurrence of devoiced vowels:
Table 3.3. Examples of voiceless vowels
i8 baRi•
rainy season but¬i•
red u8
namu8 tree type
deRu8 chin
Speakers of the western dialect of Sandawe are more likely to pronounce words with voiceless vowels than speakers of the eastern dialect. The form
konkoRi• ‘rooster’, for example, is a western pronunciation corresponding to the eastern pronunciation
konkoR. Other non-phonemic voiceless vowel qualities can be found in Sandawe. Sometimes, a short
voiceless vowel with the quality of an adjacent vowel usually the preceding one is heard after a glottal stop Elderkin 2003:6. This can occur in, for example,
kwa a8na ‘five’.
In lexical items, the quality of the voiceless vowel appears to be at least partly predictable according to the preceding segments. The unrounded front vowel
i• tends to occur after alveolar consonants, and the rounded back vowel
u8 after bilabial and velar consonants. See exception in footnote 19. Other examples suggest a link between the quality of an elided vowel
and that of the previous vowel in the word. For example, xu˘¬u8 ‘niche’ can be contrasted with
he˘¬i• or h‡˘¬i• ‘to bark’, and nuku8 ‘to be tight’ with h¤ki• ‘to go’. In these cases, there is vowel harmony in terms of frontness and backness. These patterns are not evident in
grammatical morphemes, as can be seen if we compare the first person singular, low toned PGN
16
morpheme - s•› with the third person feminine, singular, low toned PGN morpheme -
su8.
3.2 Nasal vowels
