Last updated: 2020-04-22
COMPROMISED: conflation among placeless /N/, /m/, and /n/
Background
Language Family: Arawakan / Maipuran / Southern Maipuran / Campa
- Asháninka is spoken in Peru.
Phonology
Consonants
- Asháninka is said to have a placeless nasal phoneme /N/ that occurs in word-medial codas, assimilating in place to following stops and affricates (Mihas 2019, 3583; Chen 2019, 3). In the rules, I transcribe ⟨m⟩ to /m/ and ⟨n⟩ to /n/, meaning there is conflation among /N/, /m/, and /n/, so the language is compromised.
- Accounts of the phonemic inventory somewhat differ, seemingly rooted in the overlap with the closely related language Ashéninka (Mihas 2019, 3583). I have chosen to follow the analysis done by Chen (2019) (p. 5).
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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
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t
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k
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Affricates
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ts
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tʃ
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Fricatives
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β
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s
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ʃ
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h
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Nasals
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m
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n
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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: Asháninka also has a placeless /N/ (described above the chart).
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Vowels
- Vowel length is contrastive in Asháninka (Chen 2019, 4–5). Long vowels are indicated by duplicate graphemes.
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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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Mid
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e
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o
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Low
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a
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Diphthongs
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/ai/, /ao/, /oi/, /ei/, /io/, /ea/
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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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c
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/k/
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e
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/e/
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i
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/i/
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k
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/k/
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j
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/h/
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m
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/m/
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n
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/n/
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o
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/o/
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p
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/p/
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r
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/ɾ/
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s
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/s/
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t
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/t/
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v
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/β/
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y
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/j/
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Multigraph
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ch
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/tʃ/
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sh
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/ʃ/
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qu
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/k/
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ts
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/ts/
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Lenition Rules
- Voiceless stops may become voiced following nasals and intervocalically (Buttner 1991, 57; Mihas 2019, 3584).
Misc. Rules
- /n/ assimilates in place preceding /k/ (Buttner 1991, 57).
- /t/, /n/, and /s/ may palatalize preceding front vowels (ibid.; Chen 2019, 8).
References
Buttner, Thomas Th. 1991. “Aspects of Language Planning in Ashaninka (Eastern Peru).” In Standardization of National Languages.
Chen, Eric. 2019. “Phonological Reconstruction of Proto-Kampa Consonants.” Berkeley Papers in Formal Linguistics 2 (1): 57.
Mihas, Maxwell E. 2019. “Phonetic Exponence of Word-Level Stress in Ashaninka (Arawak).” In Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.