Yawelmani Yokuts

Consonants

Vowels

Yawelmani has 10 vowel phonemes:^[6]: 19

• There are 5 short-long vowel pairs.
• Short high vowels may become more centralized in fast speech: /i/ → [ɪ], /u/ → [ʊ].
• Long high vowels are almost always lower than their short counterparts: /iː/ → [ɛː], /uː/ → [ɔː].
• All long vowels may be shortened by a phonological process. Thus, a single long vowel has two different phonetic realizations:
  • /iː/ → [ɛ, ɛː],
  • /ɛː/ → [ɛ, ɛː],
  • /aː/ → [a, aː],
  • /uː/ → [ɔ, ɔː],
  • /ɔː/ → [ɔ, ɔː].
• Note that the high long vowel /uː/ is usually pronounced the same as /ɔ/ and /ɔː/.
• Note that the high long vowel /iː/ is usually pronounced the same as /ɛ/ and /ɛː/.

As can be seen, Yawelmani vowels have a number of different realizations (phones) which are summarized below; [ɪ] and [ʊ] are variants in rapid speech of /i/ and /u/, respectively:^[6]: 19

Syllable & phonotactics

The Yawelmani syllables can be either a consonant-vowel sequence (CV), such as in wa 'however', or a consonant-vowel-consonant sequence (CVC), such as in xat 'eating, food'.^{[6]: 26,95,238} Thus the generalized syllable is the following:

CV(C)

Verbal roots^[b] are disyllabic and have either one of two shapes:^[6]: 26

• CV.CV
• CV.CVC

Outside of verbal roots, more complex phonotactic forms are also permitted, so long as each syllable has the structure CV(C).^{[6]: 26–27}

Restrictions exist on the distribution of certain glottalized consonant phonemes in surface form: glottalized nasals and approximants cannot appear word-initially or after another consonant; if they would otherwise appear after another consonant, they lose their glottalized quality.^[6]: 19

Phonological processes

Case system

Yawelmani is a primary object language.^[3]

A. L. Kroeber documented the language's case system in his 1907 paper The Yokuts Language of South Central California.^[8]

In his 1944 grammar of the Yokuts language, Newman analyzed the case system in greater depth, taking care for the different realizations of the case suffixes with nouns based primarily on the phonotactic profile of the root or stem to which the nouns attach, as in the table below.^[6] Note that the forms represent the basic case suffixes; in Newman's analysis, vowel harmony with the preceding syllable may apply as appropriate. Elements in parentheses are analyzed by Newman to be added to the root in preparation for the affix (which he terms an "inorganic protective element"),^[6]: 11 rather than forming part of the affix itself. Moreover, Newman treats the CV:C category (his IAb type) as generally a variant of CVC (his IAa type), except for two unique members of the CV:C class, yeet'- 'one' and mooṣ- 'sweathouse'.^[6]: 175

Examples of these paradigms are provided in the following table.