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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The following template illustrates the word order within the noun phrase. Noun phrases in Akye are head-initial and the specifier follows the modifiers. The final element of the phrase is the relative clause. Determiners, demonstratives and quantifiers stand in complementary distribution.
| Noun
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Adjective *
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Numeral
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{DEM DET QUANT}
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Relative Clause
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| dzākwɛ́
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bı́ gbāgbā
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mı̄
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yı̋
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kēé mɛ̀ tùn
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| tree
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green, nice
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alone
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this
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that I planted
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| dzākwɛ́
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*gbāgbā bı́
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mı̄
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yı̋
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kēé mɛ̀ tùn
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Let me also note that adjectives of colour need to precede adjectives of quality or quantity, as shown above.
Akye nouns express 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"
Akye features pronoun doubling, that is, a definite noun phrase needs to co-occur with a pronominal with which it agrees. This is illustrated in the following.
(2a)
abijan ʃukusɔn ba ba dze ʃuku
“The Abijan students go to school”
| ʃukusɔn | | ʃuku | sɔn |
| school | AGT |
| N |
(2b)
*abijan ʃukusɔn ba dze ʃuku
“Students of Abidjan went to school.”
| ʃukusɔn | | ʃuku | sɔn |
| school | AGT |
| N |
(2c)
*abijan ʃukusɔn ba dze ʃuku
| ʃukusɔn | | ʃuku | sɔn |
| school | AGT |
| N |
The following sentences illustrate that a possessive nominalized verb such as his helping of orphans (3b) requires the occurrence of a noun phrase final definiteness marker.
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 |
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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 emphatic imperfective aspect the object precede the verb. This is illustrated below in (4). In this case the VP has the same structure as the verb in its citation form. The verb eat for example in its citation form is kà shì which means thing eat".
(4)
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| TAM
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See under Inflectional Morphology
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| infinitival forms
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Akye does not distinguish between the verb's base form and an infinitive form. In fact verbs in their base form can be used as nouns.
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| Special properties
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Akye has serial verb constructions. One such construction is illustrated below:
(5)
mɛ̀ fè kpāŋ̀ shè
“I sold bread”
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| Bibliography
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Hood, Elizabeth and Constance Kutsch Lojenga. 1981. "Conte attié."
Kutsch Lojenga, Constance and Elisabeth Hood. 1983. "L’attié."
Kutsch Lojenga, Constance and Elizabeth Hood. 1981. "Proverbes attié."
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