Nepali Phonology
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Contents |
[edit] Work On Progress.
|- Nepali language has three important dialects: easter, central, and western. A large variety of dialects are found in Nepal and other parts of the South Asian countries.
[edit] Vowels
Nepali has altogether 11 vowels, including 5 nasals. Although the Sanskrit -the mother language of Nepali - has the distinctions of vowel length ( as / i versus i: and /u versus u:/), the language does not have phonological distinction of vowel length. Due to the h-deletion there is however some marginal contextes where some speaker produce the long vowels as in /pahaɽ/ --> [paaɽ] [1]
Table 1 and table 2 presents the oral and nasal vowels of Nepali.
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i, ĩ | u, ũ | |
| Mid | e, ẽ | o | |
| ʌ, ʌ~ | |||
| Low | a, ã |
Table 1: The vowels of Nepali.
As the above list shows, there are five nasal vowels in Nepali. The mid high back vowel /o/ stragely does not have its phonological nasal counterparts. The nasal counter parts [oN] however exists phonetically in the language but they often have the allophonic oral counterpart. The both varieties [hotso] and [hoNtso] "short" , [bheDaa] and [bheNDaa] "sheep" are found in the language.
Few phonolgical distinctive oral and nasal pairs exist in the langauge. /nau/ "name" vs /nau/ "barber", /gau/ "village" versus /gau/ "sing!" Imperative 2 person singual" are some examples. The nasal vowels though phonoogical active in the langauge, are not very productif, i.e. the lexicon with nasal vowels are rather few in Nepali, compared to French where the number of nasal vowels are high. The nasal vowels however present in the system, they are not very productive in other categories than verbs. Beside the nasal vowels, the oral vowel preceded by the nasal consonants can be nasalised.
The diphthongs in Nepali
The orthographical system shows two diphthongs, heritage of Sanskrit, they are "ai" and "au", but author like Adhikari 1999:5 admit that phonetically there are more diphthongs in Nepali. Pokharel1989 proposes ten Nepali diphthongs.
| diphthongs | Examples | Glose |
|---|---|---|
| ui | dui | ‘two’ |
| iu | dziu | ‘body’ |
| ei | sʌnei | ‘trumpet’ |
| eu | euʈa | ‘one’ |
| oi | poi | ‘husband’ |
| ou | dʱou | ‘wash!’ |
| ?i | dui | ‘when’ |
| ?u | dzʌu | ‘barley’ |
| ai | bʱai | ‘younger brother’ |
| au | dui | ‘come’ |
Table 4: The Nepali diphthongs (Pokharel 1989)
[edit] Consonants
Nepali has 27 consonants ( Bandhu et al. 1971, Pokharel 1989), but we can find some other consonants in the borrowed sanskrti words. These borrowed segments are used by the scholars, and more especially by those who are influenced by the Sanskrit grammars. The table 4 presents the nepali consonants.
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- Table: Consonants of Nepali.
All consonants, except the h, w and j, can be geminated (double in length) in nepali. Apart giving the lexical distinctive words - as in /ts?p?l/ "instable" and /ts?pp?l/ "slipper", the gemination also presents the intensive degree of adjectives like in miTho "delicious" versus miTTho] "very delicious".
[edit] Loanwords
Loanwords from Sanskrit introduce some phonemes that are not active in the phonological inventory of Nepali language. These borrowed words are tried to pronounce as described in the sanskrit grammar by the scholars, so the phonemes like the nasal retroflex - as in /baN/ " arrow" loanword sanskrit, the more back S - as in /nareS/ "king" and nasal approximants in ??might occur. Interestingly, as the language does not have any phonological distinctive /s/ and /S/ the speakers tend to get mixed up with these two different sounds in their hypercauristic attitude.
[edit] Bibliography
Clements, G.N. & Khatiwada, R. (2007). “Phonetic realization of contrastively aspirated affricates in Nepali.” In Proceedings of ICPhS XVI (Saarbrücken, 6-10 August 2007), 629- 632.
Dahal, M.D. (1974). A description of Nepali: Literary and colloquial. PhD Dissertation, University of Pune, India.
Pokharel, M.P. (1989), Experimental phonetics of Nepali, PhD Dissertation, University of Pune, India.
Khatiwada, R. (2007), Nepalese retroflex stops: a static palatography study of inter- and intra-speaker variability in proceedings of the Interspeech 2007, 27-31 August, 2007, Antwerp, Belgium.
