Sound System Sketch of a Gengbe Speaker from Batonou
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Abstract
Gengbe is the under-resourced lingua franca to much of Southern Togo as well as southeastern Ghana and southwestern Benin. This study presents a basic description of the Gengbe sound system starting with the inventory of consonants and vowels with particular attention paid to the Voice Onset Time (Lisker & Abramson, 1964) of stops and ultrasound images of the two-way voiced coronal distinction (/d/ vs. /ɖ/) with data from our Gengbe language assistant, a male speaker in his 50s from Batonou, Togo. Special attention is also afforded to syllable structure, focusing on co-occurrence restrictions on CV syllables and a description of Gengbe’s typologically uncommon maximal CCV syllable. This description concludes with a brief discussion of tone and a transcribed story excerpt. It is intended as a basic overview of Gengbe’s phonetics and phonology with highlights of relevant topics for study, meant to serve as a jumping-off point for future phonetic and phonological research on Gengbe.
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