A Historical Phonology of Central Chadic

Abstract

Of all of the African language families, the Chadic languages belonging to the Afroasiatic macro-family are highly internally diverse due to a long history and various scenarios of language contact. This pioneering study explores the development of the sound systems of the 'Central Chadic' languages, a major branch of the Chadic family. Drawing on and comparing field data from about 60 different Central Chadic languages, H. Ekkehard Wolff unpacks the specific phonological principles that underpin the Chadic languages' diverse phonological evolution, arguing that their diversity results to no little extent from historical processes of 'prosodification' of reconstructable segments of the proto-language. The book offers meticulous historical analyses of some 60 words from Proto-Central Chadic, in up to 60 individual modern languages, including both consonants and vowels. Particular emphasis is on tracing the deep-rooted origin and impact of palatalisation and labialisation prosodies within a phonological system that, on its deepest level, recognises only one vowel phoneme */a/.

Did Proto-Chadic have velar nasals and prenasalised obstruents?

“…The existence of underlying segments with double articulation, such as pre-nasalized stops (frequent in Chadic), labial-velar and palatalized consonants, is to a certain degree dependent on the theoretical assumptions and the methods of phonological analysis, in particular on the way a given researcher discovers a distinction between consonant clusters and single phonemes. (Frajzyngier 2012: 508) The present paper addresses exactly this issue against the backdrop of very recent studies on the historical phonology and lexical reconstruction in Central Chadic (see Wolff 2022;Wolff in press). Central Chadic (CC), with 79 known languages (Eberhard et al 2021) is perceived to be not only the most numerous branch of the Chadic language family by number of known languages, but also the internally most diverse (at least by expert intuition).…”

“…Given the overall prosodising typology of CC languages (Wolff 2022;Wolff in press), one can derive both suspicious nasal+obstruent clusters and prenasalised obstruents in modern CC languages from the reconstruction of a prefixal root augment *{ma-} of old Afroasiatic heritage (or any other prefixal root augment that contained a nasal consonant, such as *{na-}). We will restrict the discussion in this paper to *{ma-}, which is the most frequent nasal-initial root augment to be considered; our discussion would by analogy also apply to other nasal prefixes, wherever they may have played a comparable role.…”

“…) To the best of the author's knowledge, there has been no more recent study that would throw conclusive light on this issue of PC phonological and lexical reconstruction. Very recently, the present author has finalised two book-length studies on the historical phonology of Central Chadic (Wolff 2022) and Central Chadic lexical reconstructions (Wolff in press). These studies address the issue of proto-language reconstruction of vowel and consonant inventories, with data from up to 66 of the 79 languages of the Central Chadic branch.…”

“…Mostly we are dealing with diachronic nasal+obstruent clusters in word-initial position, which in the database are interpreted as synchronic prenasalisation n C of the word-initial consonant; 2. Quite often we deal with cases of N-prosody, by which a partially or completely de-segmentalised and prosodised petrified prefix containing a nasal consonant spreads its nasal feature across the morpheme boundary and prenasalises a root-initial or rootmedial obstruent; In the following sections 3 and 4 of this paper, these diachronic processes will be presented in some detail and illustrated by examples from Central Chadic languages of the currently accepted 18 language groups as referred to in the most recent comparative works on Central Chadic languages (Gravina 2014;Wolff 2022;Wolff in press).…”

“…For the author's view on the theoretical and methodological fundamentals of Central Chadic historical phonology and reconstructions, see Wolff (2022;Wolff in press).…”