Chapter 5. The story of *ô in the Cariban Family

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2010-05

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University of Hawai'i Press

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91

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123

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Abstract

This paper argues for the reconstruction of an unrounded mid central/back vowel *ô to Proto-Cariban. Recent comparative studies of the Cariban family encounter a consistent correspondence of ə : o : ɨ : e, tentatively reconstructed as *o2 (considering only pronouns; Meira 2002) and *ô (considering only seven languages; Meira & Franchetto 2005). The first empirical contribution of this paper is to expand the comparative database to twenty-one modern and two extinct Cariban languages, where the robustness of the correspondence is confirmed. In ten languages, *ô merges with another vowel, either *o or *ɨ. The second empirical contribution of this paper is to more closely analyze one apparent case of attested change from *ô > o, as seen in cognate forms from Island Carib and dialectal variation in Kari’nja (Carib of Surinam). Kari’nja words borrowed into Island Carib/Garífuna show a split between rounded and unrounded back vowels: rounded back vowels are reflexes of *o and *u, unrounded back vowels reflexes of *ô and *ɨ. Our analysis of Island Carib phonology was originally developed by Douglas Taylor in the 1960s, supplemented with unpublished Garifuna data collected by Taylor in the 1950s.

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Cariban, Proto-Cariban, reconstruction, comparative, phonology

Citation

Gildea, Spike, B.J. Hoff & Sérgio Meira. 2010. The story of *ô in the Cariban Family. In Andrea L. Berez, Jean Mulder, & Daisy Rosenblum (eds.), Fieldwork and Linguistic Analysis in Indigenous Languages of the Americas, 91-123. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.

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33 pages

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Table of Contents

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Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License

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