Liangmai phonology: An overview

Abstract

Liangmai, a Tibeto-Burman member spoken in North East India (NEI), has twenty consonant phonemes and six vowel phonemes with four contrastive tones. Three stops and three nasals permitted at the end of a syllable and all consonants occurs at the beginning of a syllable. A voiceless libio-dental fricative which is rare in other NEI languages is a major consonant. Vowel system has several diphthongs. The close central unrounded vowel /ɨ/ can appear as an allophone of close front unrounded vowel /i/ and close back rounded vowel /u/ as in dūip í n ~ dūip ɨ́ n ‘spring’ and t ū n ~ t ɨ̄ n ‘push’. With or without coda, the position nucleus of a syllable is occupied by an obligatory vowel and also by a syllabic consonant. Syllable has  CV and CVC patterns.  After resllabification, the structure of the syllable will appear like CCVC. Consonnat cluster is not permitted in a syllable except for a few idiolects. Nasal syllabic is abundantly present in the language. Total assimiliation occurs in phonological proces in the manner of progressive and regressive assimiliation. Both consonant and vowel undergoes syncope. Epenthesis does not occur at word level except for loan words. In fast speech, voiceless consonants are voiced inter-vocally across morphemes. The morpheme /jēi/ can be realized in six allomorphs depending on the envriornment they occur, which due to morphophonological process. The tonal system has four contrastive level of tone. Register tones are plenty and contour tones are rare.