Chapter 5. The story of *ô in the Cariban Family
| dc.contributor.author | Gildea, Spike | |
| dc.contributor.author | Hoff, B.J. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Meira, Sérgio | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2010-05-19T01:10:49Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2010-05-19T01:10:49Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2010-05 | |
| dc.description.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 Our analysis of Island Carib phonology was originally developed by Douglas Taylor in the 1960s, supplemented with unpublished Garifuna data collected by Taylor in the 1950s. | |
| dc.description.sponsorship | National Foreign Language Resource Center | |
| dc.format.extent | 33 pages | |
| dc.identifier.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. | |
| dc.identifier.isbn | 978-0-8248-3530-9 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10125/4452 | |
| dc.language.iso | eng | |
| dc.publisher | University of Hawai'i Press | |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | LD&C Special Publication 2 | |
| dc.rights | Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License | |
| dc.subject | Cariban | |
| dc.subject | Proto-Cariban | |
| dc.subject | reconstruction | |
| dc.subject | comparative | |
| dc.subject | phonology | |
| dc.title | Chapter 5. The story of *ô in the Cariban Family | |
| dc.type | Book Chapter | |
| dc.type.dcmi | Text | |
| prism.endingpage | 123 | |
| prism.startingpage | 91 |