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

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