The Holy Scriptures in Swo

At long last, the Word of God is being recorded in Swo. Lounga-Nang is excited by the experience of seeing Genesis 1:1-2:3 in his language. He will be taking around Yaounde with him tomorrow to show it to other speakers of Swo. Here is the first page of the sacred text. If you need more, ask.

New insights into the Swo phonology

A consonant is sometimes followed by a fricative in Swo. For example, some words are "b" followed by a vowel and others are "bv" in that same position.
What is growing clear is that the affricates (bv, pf, kf, dv, etc.) are all followed by a "high" vowel, /u/. I am going to be looking to see if the affricates are also found before the equally high vowels /i/ and /ɨ/. The barred "i" is high, central, unrounded.
So far, this looks very similar to what is happening in Badwe'e and in Nzime. In those languages, there is "oral cavity friction" accompanying a consonant when the following vowel is [+high].
These are subphonemic alterations in the pronunciation of a consonant.
If the Swo language truly has predictable affricatization before high vowels, the presence of the affricate would not be need to be marked.
The data would suggest this to be true. On Aug. 6, Pastor Ossimba and I observed that the affricate "ts" in [tsɨrɨ], "meat, animal", is indeed coming before a high vowel, /ɨ/, [high, central, unrounded]. It obeys the rule, therefore, that a stop becomes affricated before a high vowel, such as /i/, /ɨ/ or /u/.

So Phonology Underway

The So people are showing evidence of considerable interest in their language and are reporting that more and more people are asking how they can be involved in determining their own future. They want a future in which they can write to each other and even to future generations.

They can do this only if they have a written language.

Pastor Simon Pierre OSSIMBA and I worked this afternoon on the phonological description of their language. I began by giving him a brief lecture on phones, phonemes and graphemes.

The concern we first addressed is to understand their inventory of vowels. We are in the process of collecting words that can reflect to us how many letters are in the inventory of phonemes.

So far, we are making good progress and seem to have tentatively identified the following vowel system: