| Sandawe Language |
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Information AboutSandawe Language |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT SANDAWE LANGUAGE | |
| khoisan languages | |
| languages of tanzania | |
| language isolates | |
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SIL International began work on Sandawe in 1996 and to date (2004), Daniel and Elisabeth Hunziker and Helen Eaton continue to work on the analysis of the language. They have so far produced a phonological description, a dialect survey report and several papers on aspects of grammar. Sandawe is also currently (since 2002) studied by Sander Steeman of Leiden University . SOUNDS Vowels Sandawe has five vowel qualities: All five vowel qualities may be found as short oral, long oral and long nasal vowels. There are therefore fifteen vowel phonemes. In word-final position, devoiced u and i vowels occur frequently. Consonants Non-click consonants Clicks (source: Wright ''et al.'' 1995) The clicks in Sandawe are not particularly loud, when compared to more famous click languages in southern Africa. The lateral click can be confused with the ejective lateral affricate . With the postalveolar clicks, the tongue often slaps the bottom of the mouth, and this slap may be louder than the actual release of the click. Wright ''et al.'' transcribe this slapped click with the ''ad hoc'' symbol , although this is not the normal Extended IPA meaning of that symbol. Only three of the five click effluxes occur between vowels, and all are nasalized. (Nasal clicks are the easiest to pronounce; in Dahalo and Damin , for example, all clicks are nasal.) The glottalized click efflux is something like Creaky Voice ; it is ''not'' an Ejective . In initial position, the glottis is closed during the entire occlusion of the click, but not opened until after the burst of the , which is after the click release . In medial position, the glottis is closed after the velar closure and before the forward closure, but opened ''before'' the click release. Such clicks are not always nasalized all the way through; in some tokens they are simply prenasalized glottalized clicks, , bearing in mind that the superscript implies coarticulation (that is, that it is pronounced together with the {Link without Title} , not after, as explained above). GRAMMAR Pronouns Syllable structure Sandawe syllables are usually of the form CV; in monosyllabic words, word-final nasals are not uncommon, CV(N). Sometimes other consonants are found in word-final position, but this is most probably the result of deletion of word-final voiceless vowels. A syllabic nasal ''m'' is found in Swahili loanwords. The most common word structure is disyllabic with or without long vowels (CV(:)CV(:)), according to De Voogt (1992). Nouns A noun consists generally of a stem and a suffix which indicates gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and number (singular, plural). to be added Adjectives Adjectival concepts are mostly expressed as verbs in Sandawe according to Kagawe (1993:ix). Syntax Basic word order in Sandawe is SOV according to De Voogt (1992). However, word order in the Sandawe sentence is very flexible due to the presence of several 'subject identification strategies'. Sample sentence (mid tones are not marked): úte-s kx'aré-és hàʔ!à yesterday-I boy-I called ''Yesterday I called a boy'' (source: De Voogt 1992:19 adapted from Tucker 1977) Tone Elderkin (1989) analyzes Sandawe as having two level tones (High, Low) and two contour tones (Falling, Rising). His thesis considers the behavior of tone at word-, sentence- and discourse-level. De Voogt (1992) and Kagaya (1993) list three level tones (High, Mid, Low) and two contour tones (Falling, Rising). CLASSIFICATION The most promising candidate as a relative of Sandawe are the Khoe Languages of Botswana and Namibia . Greenberg (1976) gives the following arguments for its classification as Khoisan, in addition to about 50 Sandawe-Khoisan vocabulary similarities. Most of these involve Sandawe and Khoe:
The evidence linking the southern Khoisan families suggests that Sandawe is no more distantly related to them than they are to each other, despite the geographic distance. Although the Khoisan hypothesis is regarded with scepticism by many linguists, Sands provides additional arguments that the inclusion of Sandawe (but not Hadza ) is likely to be correct. FURTHER READING References
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