Tennet language
Encyclopedia
Tennet is a Nilo-Saharan
, Eastern Sudanic
, Surmic
language spoken by the Tennet people. The Tennet home area is a group of five villages at the northern end of the Lopit mountains, 65 kilometers northeast of Torit
.
Note that most consonants are members of a fortis/lenis
pair, and that fortis may be realized phonetically in several ways: lengthening, change from ingressive
to egressive
, trilling
, devoicing
, and fricative hardening (becoming a stop
). Note also that the fortis counterpart of the voiced velar fricative [ɣ] has been omitted. In Randal (1995), the consonant chart includes it to show the consonants in the Tennet orthography. The fortis counterpart of [ɣ] is omitted here because it is phonetically identical to the fortis counterpart of [k].
[ +ATR
] vowels and five corresponding [-ATR] vowels. The vowels are /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/, and in the current orthography, [+ATR] vowels are marked with an underline. Tongue height may vary slightly without affecting the [ATR] quality of a vowel, so unlike certain West African languages (e.g. Akan and Igbo), the [+ATR] /e/, for example, may actually be slightly lower than the [-ATR] /e/. The [+ATR] feature spreads from right to left, so a [+ATR] suffix will cause the vowels in a [-ATR] stem to become [+ATR]. Tennet uses [ATR] to mark lexical and grammatical distinctions.
Any of the ten vowels may be lengthened. In the orthography, vowels are doubled to show length.
Tennet has two level tones and a falling tone. A rising tone is treated as a low-high sequence, because it occurs only on long vowels. In the current orthography the high tone is marked with an acute accent, falling is marked with a circumflex, and low is unmarked. Tone often marks grammatical relations and occasionally marks lexical distinctions.
The number marking system is quite similar to that of Murle
, for which Arensen has proposed semantically based categories to group nouns that use the same strategy for marking number.
Tennet has a marked nominative system, where a noun takes a suffix when it is the subject of either a transitive or intransitive verb. A noun serving as a direct object is unmarked, and so are citation forms.
In an equational clause with an implicit "be" verb, both nouns are left unmarked (the accusative form).
Like other Surmic languages
, Tennet uses a modified vigesimal
counting system. "Six" is derived from "five and one," "seven" from "five and two," etc. "Ten" is a new word, followed by "ten and one," "ten and two," up to "ten and five and four," after which is a new word for "twenty," which means "a person" (10 fingers and 10 toes). "Forty" is "two people," sixty is "three people," etc.
The language has a category of words that have been analyzed as postpositions. If that is what they are, Tennet syntax contains another typological anomaly, since Greenberg's Universal 9 predicts prepositions for VSO languages. However, these postposition candidates also have some noun-like characteristics (case marking), and certain constructions containing indisputable nouns parallel the apparent postpositional constructions quite nicely.
Nilo-Saharan languages
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers , including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of Nile meet...
, Eastern Sudanic
Eastern Sudanic languages
Ehret 2001 [1984]Ehret, published in 2001 but circulating in manuscript form since at least 1984, calls the family "Eastern Sahelian", and idiosyncratically adds the Kuliak languages and Berta, which Bender assigns to higher-level branches of Nilo-Saharan, and reassigns Nyima to the southern branch...
, Surmic
Surmic languages
The Surmic Languages are a branch of the Eastern Sudanic language family.-Languages:*North: Majang *South**Southeast: Kwegu , Me'en, Mursi, Suri...
language spoken by the Tennet people. The Tennet home area is a group of five villages at the northern end of the Lopit mountains, 65 kilometers northeast of Torit
Torit
-Location:The town is located in Torit County, Eastern Equatoria State, in the southeastern part of South Sudan, close to the International border with the Republic of Uganda. Its location lies approximately , by road, east of Juba, the capital and largest city in that country...
.
Consonants
| Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals... |
Dental | Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth... |
Postalveolar Postalveolar consonant Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate... / Retroflex Retroflex consonant A retroflex consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consonants, especially in Indology... |
Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).... |
|||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Len Fortis and lenis In linguistics, fortis and lenis are terms generally used to refer to groups of consonants that are produced with greater and lesser energy, respectively, such as in energy applied, articulation, etc.... |
For Fortis and lenis In linguistics, fortis and lenis are terms generally used to refer to groups of consonants that are produced with greater and lesser energy, respectively, such as in energy applied, articulation, etc.... |
Len | For | Len | For | Len | For | Len | For | ||
| Stop Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &... |
voiceless | p | p: | t | t: | ʈ | k | k: | |||
| voiced | ɓ | b: | d̪ | ɗ | d: | ɠ | g: | ||||
| Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... / Affricate Affricate consonant Affricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative rather than directly into the following vowel.- Samples :... |
voiceless | tʃ | t:ʃ | ||||||||
| voiced | v | v: | ð | ð: | dʒ | d:ʒ | ɣ | ||||
| Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... |
m | m: | n | n: | ɲ | ŋ | ŋ: | ||||
| Flap Flap consonant In phonetics, a flap or tap is a type of consonantal sound, which is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator is thrown against another.-Contrast with stops and trills:... /Trill Trill consonant In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. Standard Spanish <rr> as in perro is an alveolar trill, while in Parisian French it is almost always uvular.... |
r | r: | |||||||||
| Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no... |
w | w: | l | l: | j | j: | |||||
Note that most consonants are members of a fortis/lenis
Fortis and lenis
In linguistics, fortis and lenis are terms generally used to refer to groups of consonants that are produced with greater and lesser energy, respectively, such as in energy applied, articulation, etc....
pair, and that fortis may be realized phonetically in several ways: lengthening, change from ingressive
Ingressive
In human speech, ingressive sounds are sounds by which the air stream flows inward through the mouth or nose. The three types of ingressive sounds are lingual ingressive or velaric ingressive , glottalic ingressive , and pulmonic ingressive...
to egressive
Egressive
In human speech, egressive sounds are sounds by which the air stream is created by pushing air out through the mouth or nose. The three types of egressive sounds are pulmonic egressive , glottalic egressive , and lingual egressive...
, trilling
Trill consonant
In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. Standard Spanish <rr> as in perro is an alveolar trill, while in Parisian French it is almost always uvular....
, devoicing
Devoicing
In phonology, voicing and devoicing are sound changes, whereby a consonant changes its type of voicing from voiceless to voiced, or vice versa, due to the influence of a phonological element in its phonological environment...
, and fricative hardening (becoming a stop
Stop consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...
). Note also that the fortis counterpart of the voiced velar fricative [ɣ] has been omitted. In Randal (1995), the consonant chart includes it to show the consonants in the Tennet orthography. The fortis counterpart of [ɣ] is omitted here because it is phonetically identical to the fortis counterpart of [k].
Vowels
Tennet has fiveAdvanced tongue root
In phonetics, advanced tongue root and retracted tongue root, abbreviated ATR or RTR, are contrasting states of the root of the tongue during the pronunciation of vowels in some languages, especially in West Africa, but also in Kazakh and Mongolian...
Any of the ten vowels may be lengthened. In the orthography, vowels are doubled to show length.
Tennet has two level tones and a falling tone. A rising tone is treated as a low-high sequence, because it occurs only on long vowels. In the current orthography the high tone is marked with an acute accent, falling is marked with a circumflex, and low is unmarked. Tone often marks grammatical relations and occasionally marks lexical distinctions.
Morphology
Like its closer Surmic relatives, Tennet uses multiple strategies to mark number on nouns.- Singular suffix: Nouns that refer to things that usually occur in groups (e.g. teeth, leaves)
- Plural suffix: Nouns referring to things that usually occur singly (e.g. turtle, carotid artery)
- Singular suffix to mark singular and plural suffix to mark plural (e.g. pipe, waterbuck)
- Tone change
- Stem change (rare)
The number marking system is quite similar to that of Murle
Murle language
Murle is a Nilo-Saharan Eastern Sudanic language spoken by the Murle people, spoken in the southeast of South Sudan, near the Ethiopian border...
, for which Arensen has proposed semantically based categories to group nouns that use the same strategy for marking number.
Tennet has a marked nominative system, where a noun takes a suffix when it is the subject of either a transitive or intransitive verb. A noun serving as a direct object is unmarked, and so are citation forms.
In an equational clause with an implicit "be" verb, both nouns are left unmarked (the accusative form).
Like other Surmic languages
Surmic languages
The Surmic Languages are a branch of the Eastern Sudanic language family.-Languages:*North: Majang *South**Southeast: Kwegu , Me'en, Mursi, Suri...
, Tennet uses a modified vigesimal
Vigesimal
The vigesimal or base 20 numeral system is based on twenty .- Places :...
counting system. "Six" is derived from "five and one," "seven" from "five and two," etc. "Ten" is a new word, followed by "ten and one," "ten and two," up to "ten and five and four," after which is a new word for "twenty," which means "a person" (10 fingers and 10 toes). "Forty" is "two people," sixty is "three people," etc.
Syntax and Typology
Tennet has a basic VSO word order. As is the case with other Surmic languages, Tennet's word order for interrogative clauses is typologically surprising. Greenberg's Universal 12 predicts that for VSO languages, interrogative words will be sentence-initial, but Tennet and its relatives have sentence-final interrogative words.The language has a category of words that have been analyzed as postpositions. If that is what they are, Tennet syntax contains another typological anomaly, since Greenberg's Universal 9 predicts prepositions for VSO languages. However, these postposition candidates also have some noun-like characteristics (case marking), and certain constructions containing indisputable nouns parallel the apparent postpositional constructions quite nicely.
External links
- EthnologueEthnologueEthnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International , a Christian linguistic service organization, which studies lesser-known languages, to provide the speakers with Bibles in their native language and support their efforts in language development.The Ethnologue...
information on Tennet - World Atlas of Language StructuresWorld Atlas of Language StructuresThe World Atlas of Language Structures is a database of structural properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials. It was first published by Oxford University Press as a book with CD-ROM in 2005, and was released as the second edition on the Internet in April 2008...
information on Tennet