Lecture | This Time for Africa series
Towards a Reconstruction of the Proto-South Omotic Suprasegmentals: Initial Findings
- Firew Elias (Addis Ababa University)
- Date
- Friday 12 December 2025
- Time
- Serie
- This Time for Africa! series
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.21
Abstract
A reconstruction of the vowel inventory and suprasegmental system of Proto-South Omotic, a supposed ancestor of five closely related languages (Aari (North and South), Banna, Diime, Hamar, and Kaaro), is presented in this study. A comparative dataset of 1,200 lexical items and over 50 paradigmatic forms per language was used to identify systematic correspondences of vowel inventories, regular accentual reflexes, prosodic innovations, and non-isomorphy points between lexical prosody and higher-level intonational domains. Our comparative analysis shows that the daughter languages display a pitch-accent prosodic system, indicating vowels as sole tone-bearing units: Aari (both North and South), Banna, Hamar, and Kaaro exhibit a single high-pitched syllable per lexeme with a higher fundamental frequency. Similarly, Diime, a northmost South Omotic language, portrays a culminative pitch-accent feature thereby every word has one peak prominence carrying either lexical or grammatical function. Thus, the Proto South Omotic most plausibly possessed a lexical pitch-accent system with exactly one H* (High pitch accent) per lexeme and no lexical low tones. Across all five daughter languages, this pattern is consistently preserved: each language maintains a single culminative H* aligned to a specific syllable or mora, with no evidence of stress reanalysis or independent tonogenesis. This uniform retention across a five-language family highlights the remarkable diachronic stability of privative pitch-accent systems, even in the presence of substantial segmental and morphological change.
The talk will be in hybrid format. You are welcome to join us online via Zoom!