1. The syllable in Kuki-Chin.
- Author
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Lotven, Samson, Berkson, Kelly, Wamsley, James C., Danaher, Jillian, Van Bik, Kenneth, and Davis, Stuart
- Subjects
TIBETO-Burman languages ,KUKI-Chin languages ,SONORANTS (Phonetics) - Abstract
The Kuki-Chin group of the Tibeto-Burman language family consists of upwards of 50 languages spoken mainly in western Myanmar, predominantly in Chin State and in neighboring areas of India and Bangladesh (Simons & Fennig (eds.). 2019. Ethnologue: Languages of the world, 21st edn. Dallas Texas: SIL International. Online version. http://www.ethnologue.com/). In the many daughter languages of Proto–Kuki-Chin, syllable structure simplification has yielded a synchronic situation in which individual languages are spread along a cline ranging from more conservative languages, some with complex onsets and vowel length distinctions, to more innovative languages, some with no coda consonants at all. The distribution and phonetic realization of these features vary across the Kuki-Chin group, raising a number of relevant questions about the underlying phonological representations of the Kuki-Chin syllable. This paper surveys representative structures from a variety of Kuki-Chin languages in order to highlight issues in syllable structure across these little-studied languages. In doing so, we aim to both unify observations on Kuki-Chin phonology related to the syllable, and to propose research that will further elucidate its structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2020
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