Basaá

Basaá [ɓàs ː] is spoken by 282,000 people in the forest area located in the South, Centre and Littoral regions of Cameroon (based on 1982 Ethnologue record; Lewis 2009). Basaá is a narrow Bantu language in the Niger-Congo language family, and it is classified as A43 (Guthrie 1967–71, A43a in Maho 2009). The ISO code of Basaá is bas (Lewis 2009).

Early records of the Basaá language appear at the beginning of the 20th century (Rosenhuber 1908, Schürle 1912, Scholaster 1914). Recent studies on Basaá phonology include topics such as vowel raising (Schmidt 1996, Mutaka & Bitjaa Kody 2000), characteristics of consonants (Schmidt 1994, Buckley 1997, Solé 2009: 224) and tone (Bôt Ba Njock 1964, Teil-Dautrey 1992, Makasso 2012). For a comprehensive overview of Basaá phonology, see Bôt Ba Njock (1962) and Hyman (2003). The Basaá language has also contributed to studies of historical phonology (Janssens 1982, 1986; Teil-Dautrey 1991). Other literature on Basaá includes dictionaries (Schürle 1912, Lemb & de Gastines 1973) as well as morphological studies (Bôt Ba Njock 1970, Voorhoeve 1980, Dimmendaal 1988, Bitjaa Kody 1990, Hyman 2000). However, a phonetic description of Basaá represents a gap in this literature, which this Illustration aims to fill.

Examples in this paper come from two sources: Hyman (2003), and the first author, who is a native speaker of the Basaá language. The accompanying recordings for this article are of a male Basaá native speaker in his thirties, recorded on a Marantz PMD661 Field Recorder using a head-worn microphone (Shure WH-30 XLR).

Consonants

The phonetic chart of Basaá consonants shows that the voiceless plosives do not have voiced counterparts, except for the labialized velar. Among the voiceless fricatives, all but /s/ and

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/χ/ have voiced counterparts. Prenasalized stops and nasals occur at all places of articulation, as do fricatives. The velar nasal /ŋ/ appears as an initial as a prefix before vowel-initial roots, as in [ -àn ] ‘cl1-chief’. Words exemplifying each of the consonants will be found in the ‘Phonotactics’ section below.

Plosives and fricatives in Basaá are in complementary distribution. Voiceless stops /p t k/ ¹ occur only word-initially. In intervocalic position, the stops undergo lenition to /β ɾ ɣ/, and before non-sonorants or in pre-pausal position the lenited sounds /ɸ χ/ are voiceless. The voiced fricatives /β ɣ/ and the voiced tap /ɾ/ can appear word-initially only when they begin a grammatical morpheme (a prefix) such as [βì-tá^m b] ‘cl8-shoe’. In the pre-pausal position only, /s/ and /h/ are in free variation, as in [móm-óh] ~ [móm-ós] ‘to console’.

Basaá also has taps, approximants and palato-alveolar affricates. The voiced alveolar plosive /d/ only occurs as part of a prenasalized stop /ⁿ d/, and so do other voiced plosives. Other Basaá sources (Lemb & de Gastines 1973) employ an orthographic ‹d› in the position of the tap /ɾ/. Loanwords such as ‘dollar’, however, are produced by Basaá speakers as [dólà], with a /d/. The voiceless tap / / is an uncommon sound, but appears in pre-pausal position.

The implosive /ɓ/ occurs in the initial position of a morpheme as in the words [ɓàs] ‘salt (cl9)’, [ɓ :ŋg ] ‘children (cl2)’ and [ɓòròl] ‘to start’. The implosive can also occur word-internally when it is morpheme-initial, as in [kàɾ-ɓà] ‘to pride oneself’, when preceded by a sonorant. After a vowel, the implosive is realized as a fricative /β/. The following illustrate:

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Vowels

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Basaá has seven phonetic vowels /i e ɛ u o ɔ a/, and each vowel may be short or long. All short vowels can be followed by a sonorant or an obstruent in monosyllabic words. Long vowels, however, cannot be followed by any consonant in a syllable. The contrast in the phonological quantity in Basaá is based on differences in vowel length without additional qualitative differences.

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Vowel raising

Basaá has two major vowel processes: vowel syncope and vowel raising. The vowel raising occurs when a verbal extension such as an applicative is added to a verb stem. Low vowels in the stem become mid vowels, and mid vowels become high vowels. High vowels do not undergo any changes. For a phonological analysis of this vowel raising, see Schmidt (1996) and Mutaka & Bitjaa Kody (2000).

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Tone

Basaá has two register tones: high and low, and two contour tones: rising and falling. Minimal pairs with register tones over two syllables (HL or LH sequences) can also be found. Each row in the following table represents a minimal tonal contrast in Basaá.

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Basaá also has a grammatical downstep process triggered by an L tone between H tones. The present tense is marked with a nasal H and a floating L tone: the H tone in the verb [ ] ‘to eat’ is downstepped in the present tense [à ń^↓ ] ‘she eats’.

Syllable structure

The syllable template of Basaá is (C)V(C) or (C)Vː. Onsets are not required in Basaá and codas are not prohibited. Syllables cannot have coda consonants when the nucleus is a long vowel.

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Syllabic nasals

Basaá has syllabic nasals that are homorganic with the place of articulation of the following consonant. The syllabic nasals occur as class prefixes in nouns or as tense morphemes in verbs. In terms of tone, syllabic nasals are assigned an L tone. When a noun begins with a palato-alveolar sound, the syllabic nasal is realized with /n/. A vowel-initial noun has a syllabic nasal prefix that is a velar nasal /ŋ/.

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Phonotactics

Basaá consonants demonstrate unusual phonotactics with respect to their occurrence within a prosodic stem (a combination of a root and suffixes, but not including prefixes). ² Most consonants in the chart can appear in stem-initial position. Voiceless fricatives /ɸ χ/, however, cannot be the first consonant in a stem. The set of consonants allowed in a prosodic word substantially decreases in positions located further away from the left edge of the prosodic stem. The first position of a prosodic stem (C₁) allows the largest contrast, but subsequent positions (C₂, C₃, C₄) only allow a limited set of consonants. When a Basaá word has four consonants, the maximum number in a prosodic stem, the last consonant is one of /n ɣ χ h/; if the fourth consonant is stem-final, then it can only be /χ/. A prosodic stem can have maximally four consonants (Hyman 2003). The following word list below is based on this phonotactic restriction in Basaá. High tone is marked with an acute accent and low tone is marked with a grave accent. The tilde (~) means free variation. When a noun does not have an overt noun class prefix, the noun class is indicated in parentheses. The bolded C_n indicates the position of the consonants illustrated in each list.

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Transcribed passage

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