An Overlooked Key Element in North Wakashan Morphophonemics

Abstract

Investigated is a morphophonemic entity that manifests itself in a rich variety of ways including doubling or glottalization of a resonant; the phonemes /a/, /i/, /u/; the morpheme boundary marker /ə/ and, in the variety of North Wakashan made famous by Franz Boas, an opposition type unknown in the other varieties. It is a byproduct of some of the complex processes triggered by attaching certain types of suffix to a stem but occurs also as a constituent of morphemes and as a device to turn bound roots into free forms. It has never before been identified and is a warning that we are nowhere near understanding the history of North Wakashan, let alone its possible relationships to neighbouring languages. No North Wakashan expertise is necessary to follow the discussion which is preceded by essential comparative phonemic and morphophonemic information.

Journal

Title: ScienceOpen Preprints

Publisher: ScienceOpen

Publication date (Electronic preprint): 20 April 2020

Affiliations

[1 ] independent researcher

Article

DOI: 10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-.PPDJWEF.v1

License:

This work has been published open access under Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0 , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Conditions, terms of use and publishing policy can be found at www.scienceopen.com .

Funding

none (not applicable)