Attie (ISO 639-3: ati) is one of the languages of the Côte d’Ivoire.
| Feature
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Description
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| Phonological Features
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| Vowel inventory
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Attie, the name used by Ethnologue for what its speakers call Akye has a system of nine oral vowels: a e i o u ɛ ɔ ʌ ɤ and five nasal ones:an,in, ɛn, ɔn, ʌn. According to my recent works, the last two oral vowels are phonetic realisations of respectively ɛ and e. In the verb system when e or ɛ is suffixed to u it becomes ɤ or ʌ. Although phonemic in the following example where: ku-e > ku-ɤ (to be old+Past); ku-ɛ > ku-ʌ (to be old+Imperfect), they are not phonemic from a strictly phonological point of view. For example instead of using <<ku-e > ku-ɤ speakers use ku-o and ku-ɔ(aperture assimilation), and so ɔ instead of ʌ which means the + round feature of 'u' which replaces the -round of ʌ.
Since I consider the nasal feature as a syllable feature I assume there are no nasal vowels in Akye. In conclusion the vowel system of Attie is: i e ɛ a u o ɔ. It is the same system as we find in Baule.
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| Vowel harmony
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Akye is not an ATR language. But we find [RO] (Round) and aperture harmony. Examples: ʃi-ɔ > ʃi-u > ʃu-u (ɔ took the aperture of i and changed into u in the middle realization; in the last realization, the Round feature of i is assimilated by the one of u so that i became round )]
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| Consonant inventory
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p, t, c, k, kp, h, b, d,l, ɟ, gb, s,v, ʃ, j, w , ts, tʃ, dz, dʒ
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| Tone
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Attie has three tones: H, M, L. We find and extra high tone as in Aŋlo but it is the merging of H tone associated with an immediate L or M tone. The three tones are lexical.
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| Syllable Structure
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The basic syllable structure of Akye is CV.
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| Morpho-syntactic Features
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Akye is an agglutinative language with both prefixes and suffixes.
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| derivational morphology (1)
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The usual prefixes for noun derivation from verbs are a, o and e. The a stands for Agent, o stands for Theme related to an animate referent and e stands for Theme related to an inanimate referent. Notice that in (1a) the locative marker lá precedes the verb while in the deverbal form in (1b) it it a suffix that follows the verbal stem. The reason for this is the the nominal form is derived from the perfective form of the verb.
(1a)
mɛ̀ mɛ̄ vı̋n lá yɛ̀
“I love my children”
(1b)
mɛ̄ àyɛ̀lá ā bʌ̀.
“My beloved comes”
| àyɛ̀lá | | à | yɛ̀ | lá |
| PFV | love | insideLOC |
| V |
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| inflectional morphology
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Verbs, as most words in Akye, are monosyllabic. Tense, Aspect Mood marking follows two distinct paradigms dependent on the vowel quality of the verb's stem vowel:
Below we show the inflection for the verbs break and eat. The verb eat can only occur transitive unless it is negated.
| baseform
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imperfective
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perfective
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irrealis
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| bú "break"
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búɔ
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bùò
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bú
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| (kà) shì "eat"
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(kà) shɛ̀
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shè (kà)
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shì (kà)
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| Nominal Phrases
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| Noun
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Adjective *
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Numeral
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{Demonstrative Determiner Quantifier}
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Relative Clause
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| tree
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green
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one
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this
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that I planted
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| syntactic structure
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Noun phrases in Akye are head initial and the specifier follows the modifiers. Relative clauses follow the specier. Adjectives of colour precede adjectives of quality or quantity. ; Numerals follow Adjectives. The genetival morpheme precedes the Noun its determines. When the Nominal Phrase has no overt definite it cannot have a corresponding pronominal agreement.
abijan ʃukusɔn dze ʃuku
“Students of Abidjan went to school”
| ʃukusɔn | | ʃuku | sɔn |
| school | AGT |
| N |
*abijan ʃukusɔn ba dze ʃuku
“Students of Abidjan went to school.”
| ʃukusɔn | | ʃuku | sɔn |
| school | AGT |
| N |
abijan ʃukusɔn ba ba dze ʃuku
“The Abijan students go to school”
| ʃukusɔn | | ʃuku | sɔn |
| school | AGT |
| N |
*abijan ʃukusɔn ba dze ʃuku
| ʃukusɔn | | ʃuku | sɔn |
| school | AGT |
| N |
nsafu-ɔn o boka mpɛtɛ-ɔ
“The soldier helped the orphan”
| ǹsáfùɔ̄ɔ̀n | | nsafu | ɔn |
| soldier | DEF |
| N |
nsafu-ɔn o mpɛtɛ boka-a
“The soldier's helping of the orphan”
| ǹsáfùɔ̄ɔ̀n | | ǹsáfùn | ɔ̄ | ɔ̀n |
| soldier | FOC | DEF |
| N |
| mɛ̀pɛ́tɛ̀ | | mɛ̀pɛ́tɛ̀ |
| orphan |
| N |
| bókàāà | | bókà | ā | à |
| help | | DEF |
| N |
The second structure is rejected because there is no Definite within the Nominal Phrase and yet it possess a corresponding pronominal agreement. The fourth structure is rejected because since the Nominal Phrase has a Def within it is not followed by a corresponding pronominal agreement. The last structure is the nominal corresponding of the previous which is a sentence.
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| nominal modification
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Nouns change from singular to plural. Most of the words in this language are monosyllabic. The vowel changes from singular to plural. The morpheme of the plural is ɔ. (e.g. Tsabi "human being" > tsabi-ɔ "human beings"). Some of them change their form: e.g. Bi "child" > vin "children"
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| nominal specification
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| possession
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| pronominal system
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| Verbal Phrases
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| word order
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Attie is an SVO language; but in the inaccomplish Aspect the object precede the Verb; in this case the VP has the same pattern as the lexical structure of the Verb.
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| TAM
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| infinitival forms
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| verbal constructions
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| Adpositions
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| Complementation
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| Special Properties
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