74 be additional contrasts in the vowel inventory. The [-ATR] mid vowels are the least
common set, which could be used as an argument that they are the marked vowels in the system.
33
Overall, these numbers provide good evidence of seven vowel phonemes in Ikoma, showing the high functional load of both sets of mid vowels.
3.3 Vowel length
Hyman 2003 lists five sources of vowel length in Bantu languages see also Stegen 2005 for similar discussion. Aside from phonemic vowel length, the other sources are
vowel concatenation, glide formation, NC sequences and penultimate vowel lengthening. The one source from Hyman which is not significant in Ikoma is penultimate vowel
lengthening. Ikoma has phonemic length, with all seven vowels having a long-vowel counterpart, as described in §3.3.1. There is also conditioned vowel length resulting from
both glide formation and prenasalization, described in §3.3.2. Finally, length derived from vowel concatenation at morpheme boundaries is the topic of §3.3.3.
3.3.1 Phonemic vowel length
Both noun and verb roots can have phonemic long vowels, typically as the first vowel of the root. Some verbal pairs showing contrast are in 59 below.
59 Vowel length contrast pairs
9 9
9 9
? ?
? ?
9 9
9 9
8 8
9 8
8 .
- -
2
33
Rice 2007 mentions that frequency is a possible diagnostic of markedness, but one which is sometimes less conclusive than other markedness indicators. Note, however, that another reason for fewer instances of
is that these vowels are raised to [e o] preceding high vowels, as discussed in §4.2.
75 Additional examples of phonemic vowel length for all seven vowels are given in 60
below. Because many examples of phonemically short vowels were already given in 57 when showing contrast among phonemes, only long vowel examples will be included
here. Please refer back to 57 to get a clearer picture of vowel length contrast. As in 57 above, for each vowel I once again give a number of examples of infinitive verbs
followed by nouns, this time with the stem shape CVVCV. In cases in which few examples are given, this represents a gap in my data.
60 Phonemic long vowels
ST 2
ST 2
ST 2
ST 2
ST 2
ST 2
ST 2
ST 2
8 -
8 1 2 .
. 8
- 9 9
- .
8 . :
6 :
8 :2
8 6
9 8
:2 6
- 8 =
- :
6 6 6
. -
ST 2
ST 2
ST 2
ST 2
ST 2
ST 2
ST 2
ST 2
8 8
9 8
8 9 8
2 8
- : 8
: 8
= 2
8 2
.8 8
= 8
8 2
8 :2
8
76 ST
2 ST
2 ST
2 ST
2 ST
2 ST
2 ST
2 ST
2 8
.8 8
F 2
8 9 8
8 9 :
8 .8
8 -
8 F
. 2 .8
8 2 .8 2
8 .
. 8
:2 8 ́
98 F ́
9 ́
6 ́ ́
2 1
:2 Q
ST 2
ST 2
ST 2
ST 2
8 ; 8 F 8
2 8
: 8
2 6
. 2
F .
F 8 -
F F
It is interesting to note the limited number of words with long front vowels in comparison with long back vowels. In particular, in my data there is only a single example of [ee] in a
canonical CVVCV stem the verb [ko- eeka] ‘wear’. The other examples given with [ee] are longer stems. There are also only three total examples of [ ] in nouns. This lack
of examples of [ee] and [ ] is unexplained.
77 Finally, note that long vowels do not occur in word-final position, and they can
only occur in word-initial syllables if the syllable has an onset. See the following sections on conditioned and derived vowel length for discussion of both of these issues.
3.3.2 Conditioned vowel length
