3 Phonology

Abstract

Yélî Dnye almost certainly has, with 90 distinctive segments, the largest phoneme inventory in the Pacific.Many of these are exotic sounds, and some of them are unique in the languages of the world, as far as we know.It is the only known language with systematic labial-coronal double-articulations (labial-dental, labial post-alveolar, as well as labial-velar), which occur in both stops and nasals.It is also the only known language combining prenasalized stops, nasally-released stops and a contrast between oral and nasalized vowels, requiring extremely fine control of the oral/nasal contrast.Given the scientific importance of these rare sound contrasts, the system has been investigated in collaboration with Ian Maddieson, and the following remarks are informed by this collaborative work (Maddieson & Levinson, nd).Ongoing work with Marisa Casillas investigates the order of acquisition of these complex sounds by children (see Casillas et al. 2020). The phoneme inventoryWe can think of the huge consonantal array as built up in the following way.There are four basic points of articulation, from bilabial stop, alveolar stop, post-alveolar stop to velar stop (Table 3.1).In addition, each of these positions can be prenasalized, and post-alveolar or velar stops nasally released.The 'dentals' range from dental to alveolar, while the post-alveolars may not always reach real retroflex positions (following Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996, we represent this as e.g./t/ vs. /ṭ /, not /t̪ / vs. /t/ as in Henderson 1995).However, ultrasound recordings of a single speaker performed in 2009 show that some articulations at least are full sub-apical retroflexes.This contrast is reinforced in various ways, e.g. in /nm/ vs. /ṇm/ the release is primarily labial vs. coronal respectively, and intervocally the post-alveolar stop /ṭ/ becomes a retroflex flap [ɽ].Incidentally, linguography on the same single speaker shows the alveolar stops are laminal, at least on the four tokens collected.Table 3.1: Stops and nasals -1 Single articulations.