Last Updated: 2019-07-02
Background
Language Family: Witotoan / Boran
- Bora is spoken in five villages within the Loreto Region of Peru.
Phonology
Consonants
- Roe (2014) describes /x/ as a phoneme in Bora (p. 8); Thiesen, Wesley and Weber, David (2012) lists /x ~ h/ in free variation (p. 33), and while he prefers /h/ as the underlying phoneme, the majority of the evidence seems to point to /x/.
- Different authors have interpreted the flap differently: opinions have ranged from /r/ to /ɾ/ to /ɽ/ (Roe 2014, 9). I have opted to prefer /ɾ/ in my ruleset.
- Consonants followed by /j/ palatalize, and the /j/ deletes. Thiesen, Wesley and Weber, David (2012) does not make a firm decision on whether these palatalized consonants are contrastive (p. 33); Roe (2014) argues against it (pp. 8-9), and I follow her lead in my ruleset.
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Place of Articulation
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Manner of Articulation
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Bilabial
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Alveolar
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Postalveolar
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Palatal
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Velar
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Glottal
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Stops
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p pʰ
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t tʰ
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k kʰ kp
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ʔ
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Affricates
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ts tsʰ
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tʃ tʃʰ
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Fricatives
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β
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x
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Nasals
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m
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n
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ɲ
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Flaps
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ɾ
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Approximants
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j
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Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are unaspirated and those on the right are aspirated. The third phoneme in the velar stop cell is a voiceless labiovelar stop.
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Vowels
- Bora has two contrastive tones, high and low (Thiesen, Wesley and Weber, David 2012, 27).
- High tone is marked with an acute accent (´) on the vowel, whereas low tone is unmarked (Thiesen, Wesley and Weber, David 2012, 27).
- Vowel length is contrastive in Bora. Long vowels are written by repeating the vowel character (Thiesen, Wesley and Weber, David 2012, 31).
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Front
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Central
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Back
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High
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i
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ɨ
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ɯ
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Mid
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ɛ
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o
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Low
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a
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Alphabet
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Grapheme
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Phoneme
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a
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/a/
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b
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/p/
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c
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/kʰ/
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d
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/t/
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e
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/ɛ/
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g
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/k/
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h
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/ʔ/
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i
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/i/
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ɨ
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/ɨ/
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j
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/x/
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k
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/kʰ/
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m
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/m/
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n
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/n/
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ñ
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/ɲ/
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o
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/o/
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p
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/pʰ/
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r
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/ɾ/
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t
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/tʰ/
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u
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/ɯ/
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v
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/β/
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w
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/kp/
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y
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/j/
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Digraph
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ch
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/tʃʰ/
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ds
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/ts/
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ll
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/tʃ/
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ts
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/tsʰ/
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Syllable Structure
- Bora syllables mostly take the form of (C)V, although /x/ and /ʔ/ can appear as syllable codas (Roe 2014, 9).
Lenition Rules
- Postconsonantal /j/ tends to delete, and instead just palatalizes the previous consonant (Thiesen, Wesley and Weber, David 2012, 27).
- In syllable codas, /x/ is simply produced as a preaspiration of the following consonant (written by Thiesen as ⟨ˣ⟩) (Thiesen, Wesley and Weber, David 2012, 40).
- Syllable-final /ʔ/ is produced simply as a glottalization of the vowel (written as ⟨ˀ⟩) (Thiesen, Wesley and Weber, David 2012, 28).
- /kp/ becomes [kʷ] in fast speech, particularly among younger speakers (Roe 2014, 9).
Misc. Rules
- /i/ lowers in /x/-final syllables, and centralizes to [ɨ] when /ɨ/ is present in the following syllable (Thiesen, Wesley and Weber, David 2012, 30).
- /ɛ/ lowers to [æ] before syllables that contain /i/ (Thiesen, Wesley and Weber, David 2012, 31).
- Epenthesis of [ʔ] occurs at the beginning of vowel-initial phrases, and the end of vowel-final phrases (Thiesen, Wesley and Weber, David 2012, 36).
- In Bora, two low-tone vowels cannot occur consecutively unless they are word-final (Thiesen, Wesley and Weber, David 2012, 69).
References
Roe, Amy. 2014. “The Phonetics and Phonology of Bora Tone.” Master’s thesis, University of North Dakota.
Thiesen, Wesley, and Weber, David. 2012. A Grammar of Bora with Special Attention to Tone. SIL International.