The Representation of Vowel Duration in Civili Dictionaries

Abstract

Abstract:Civili is a developing language spoken in Gabon and in a few neighbouring countries. This article focuses on the representation of vowel duration in Civili dictionaries. The representation in these dictionaries is inconsistent. In the article, it is argued that this inconsistency stems from a twofold phonetic-phonological issue, which has implications for the word writing system of the language. The article provides an assessment of the existing orthography proposals for Civili and offers materials for a new proposal that takes the vowel duration issue into account.Subsequently, it is recommended that vowel duration be represented by a diaeresis above the vowel for both the orthography and the lemmatization in reference works such as dictionaries and school and religious textbooks.

Language Science and Language Technology in Africa: Festschrift for Justus C. Roux

“…Ndinga- Koumba-Binza (2004:197-198, 2008:29-53, 2012 has assessed existing data stemming from studies by Marichelle (1902), Ndamba (1977), Blanchon (1990), Mabika Mbokou (1999, and Ndinga- Koumba-Binza (2000). These data have been found impressionistic and inadequate for a reliable processing of Civili vocalic quantity.…”

“…Describing the issue, Ndinga-Koumba-Binza (2004) has noted that the so-called Civili vowel length desperately needs to be re-examined because previous works on the phenomenon in the language (Marichelle 1902, Ndamba 1977, Blanchon 1990, Mabika Mbokou 1999, Ndinga-Koumba-Binza 2000 referred to impressionistic phonetic observations and do not rely on experimentally-gathered and verified data. This view launched the research work by Ndinga- Koumba-Binza (2008& 2012, which is an experimental phonetic investigation into the vowel duration of Civili.…”

“…It may be assumed that these data were gathered not only for phonetic analyses, but also for morphosyntactical (Ndamba 1977), analogical (Mabika Mbokou 1999), phonological and tonological (Blanchon , 1990Blanchon & Nsuka-Nkutsi 1984;Ndinga-Koumba-Binza 2000) descriptions, as well as for a dictionary compilation purpose (Marichelle 1902). Also note that these studies did not have any acoustic data as primary source.…”

“…The words included into the corpus were based on the following previous studies on the Civili language spoken in Mayumba: Mabika Mbokou (1999);and Ndinga-Koumba-Binza (2000). In general, corpora have to meet certain criteria, which are usually subsumed under the general principle of representativeness.…”

“…An account of how perceptual data should be acquired and how perceptual data were used in NdingaKoumba-Binza (2008) has indeed been the subject of other publications by NdingaKoumba-Binza (2009, 2011 & 2012), Ndinga-Koumba-Binza and Roux (2009aRoux ( & 2009b, and Roux and Ndinga-Koumba-Binza (2011).…”