Long vowels in oromo : agenerative approach
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Date
1988-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This paper presents the qenerative analysis of long
vowels in Oromo . mhe paper has four parts.
The fisst part presents a brief accounL of related
literature . All the r e vielqed literature has presentee. the loner
vowels in Oromo but they do not account for them by providing
enough lin9uistic data. In ac1c'ition, all the r e viewed literatuee
does not identify the surface l~nq vowels f rom the sase long
vo\qels.
The second part has treated the long vO>lels in Orom6.
The long vowels are found to be both distinctive and nondistinctive.
The distinctive lonq vOl-leIs occur followed by
single consonant ·. . They are also ide ntical in quality
to that of their short counte r parts. The non-distinctive lonq
vowels again do not have an identical short c ounter
part s as the distinctive long vowel s. At the root l evel
they occur in the (I) , __ c 2 ,e nvironrnent . The predictability
of the se long vowels (4.e non- (l.istinctive long vowels that
can appear in the (c l ) __ c 2 e nvironroent) is proved with
five evidence. The e vidence which hi\s p roven the occurence
of the non-distinctive lonq vowels in the (c l )_ c 2 e nvironment
is (1) loans from A'Jlharic, (2) the Dird Talk in Oromo,
(3) the ~lritten source , (4) the verb inflection especially
the glide ending roots ann (5) the metrical analysis of
poetic stres§ and compensatory l e ng thening.
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Keywords
vowels in oromo