The Phonology of Amharic Ideophones

Abstract

The paper aims at describing the phonology of Amharic ideophones. It shows some peculiar phonological and phonetic features of ideophones in the language. The data used in this study are collected from fieldwork. Amharic ideophones use the entire 30 consonant phonemes including labiovelar phonemes: /kʷ/, /ɡʷ/, and /k'ʷ/, labialized sounds such as [fʷ, tʷ, t'ʷ, dʷ, ʃʷ, ʒʷ, mʷ…] of the regular phonology and some click-like sounds such as ʘ, ǃ, ǁ, and ʞ,   which are not found in the regular phonology of the language. These click-like sounds form ideophones like ɨmʘa adərrəg-ə ‘kissed’ ʞɨ- al-ə ‘disapproved’ ǁɨǁɨǁɨǁɨ al-ə  ‘regretted’ ǃuǃuǃu al-ə 'urged the horse to trot’ and ǁuǁuǁu al-ə ‘called dog’.  Moreover, the phonotactic of Amharic ideophones shows a C₁VC₂C₂ syllable structure that is specific to ideophones. Furthermore, Amharic has no long vowels, but the suprasegmental of ideophones illustrates expressive vowel lengthening in the word medial and final positions. However, these long vowels are only phonetic.  In the same way, ideophones also apply the word final expressive consonant lengthening to show intensity, durativity, and distance. Some of these deviations from the regular phonology are well-attested universal phonological features of ideophones (Bodomo 2006:204 and Franck2014:17).