Atelier de Phonologie - Lameen Souag - 19 novembre

 

̀Lameen Souag - LACITO (CNRS - Sorbonne Nouvelle - INALCO)

The West Nilotic family is spread across inland East Africa from South Sudan to Kenya, with three primary branches: Dinka-Nuer, Burun, and Lwoo. Its historical reconstruction is less advanced even than that of East and South Nilotic, but is ongoing in the context of the NILOMORPH project. Cognate sets across West Nilotic reveal a simple but cross-linguistically unusual regular correspondence between Dinka-Nuer /t̪j-/, /d̪j-/, /n̪j-/, Burun /c-/, /ɟ-/, /ɲ-/, and Lwoo /p-/, /b-/, /m-/ respectively. Alongside these, we also find sporadic variation between dentals and bilabials within both Nuer and Lwoo. An examination of lexical contrasts suggests that Dinka (and to a lesser extent Nuer) best preserve the original forms in this case, indicating a direction of change dental + /j/ > bilabial in Lwoo rather than the reverse. This seemingly unprecedented change appears impossible to account for in terms of feature spread or auditory similarity, but may have been motivated by contrast maximisation.