South Mande Reconstruction: Initial consonants1 - Langues mandé ...

Note: The phonological status of ll- is yet to be confirmed.Vowels: Like in Gban, plus ŋ.Tones: three level tones. Each vocalic element of a foot can carry atone of its own.2.9. Beng [Paesler 1992].Consonants:p t c k kpb d j g gbf sv zl y wm n ɲ ŋ ŋmNotes:a) According to Paesler, Beng seems to be the only South Mande languagewhere the principle of nasal harmony is not valid. But even inBeng, oppositions l : n, y : ɲ are marginal, and forms contravening thenasal harmony are attested only in some single words, mainly grammaticalones (y '3sg. pronoun' vs. ɲ 'to end'; nē 'therefore' vs. lē 'sp. offruit'). It can be concluded that the emergence of these forms and the endof the nasal harmony rule must be a recent innovation.b) ŋm is a rare phoneme, it is attested in 6 words only.Vowels: Like in Gban plus vocalic ŋ. Each vocalic element of a footcan carry a tone of its own.Tones: 3 level and 4 modulated tones: low-high, mid-high, high-low,mid-low.3. Reconstruction of the initial consonants of the Proto-SouthMande language.At the moment, there are altogether 770 correspondence sets in mySouth Mande database, including dubious ones and those which are representedby pairs of lexical items from closely related languages (Dan –Tura, Dan – Mano, Dan – Tura – Mano, Guro – Yaure, Mwan – Wan; those