AkanandtheKwaLanguages.pptVIP

Akan and the Kwa Languages;Akan and the Kwa Languages;Location of the Kwa family of languages;Down to the Tano subgroup, the biggest subgroup is Akan.We focus on the Akan subgroup.;The Akan Languages;2. Some facts about Akan;I. Phonology;ii. Vowels: There is the feature of vowel harmony (based on Advanced Tongue Root (ATR)). With VH, the vowels are divided into two sets; i.e., +ATR (i, e, o, u, a) and –ATR (I, E, ?, U, A) Vowels from one set appear in a word. E.g. afidie ‘machine’ AfIdIE ‘what is vomitted’ There is also the feature of vowel harmony (based on rounding) in Fante. E.g. mE-rE- ‘I-Prog’ in me-re-dzi ‘I’m eating’ and mo-ro-ko ‘I’m fighting’.; iii. Syllabic nasality: This is a typological feature in the languages. Syllabic nasals are often realized as plural markers in nouns and negative markers in verbs. E.g.: /N/ indicates plural number in some nouns, mm?fra ‘children’ (ab?fra ‘a child’) and ntE ‘marbles’ (atE ‘a marble’) /N/ also indicates negation in verbs, mfa ‘don’t take’ (fa ‘take’ ) and nnoa ‘don’t cook’ (noa ‘cook’);iv. Tone: Akan languages are tone languages. They are primarily two-toned with cases of downstep (H). tones express both lexical and grammatical oppositions. Examples are: in the nouns, pa$pa@ ‘father’ and pa@pa@ ‘goodness’ in the declarative and hortative readings of pronouns e.g. Ko?fi@ n@ka$sa@ ‘Kofi does not talk.’ Ko?fi@ n@ka@sa@ ‘Kofi should talk.’;v. Syllable structure: Asante always manifests open syllables, but Fante and Akuapim may have close syllables. E.g. Fante/Akuapim ka@n@ ‘to read’ Asante ka@i@ ‘to read’ Other close syllables are reconstructed into an open syllable in Asante. e.g. e$tsi@r@ (V.CVC) ‘the head’ in Fante becomes e$ti@re@ (V.CV.CV) in Asante. ;II. Morphology: i. Noun classes: Most nouns exist in three forms: the root, the singular, and the plural. E.g. in the word for woman / wife: -sEm (root), a$sE?m? (singular), n$sE?m? (plural) In this example the singular/plur