Pendau language

Pendau has five vowel phonemes: two front vowels, /i/ and /e/, one central vowel /a/, and two back vowels /ɯ/ (orthographic u) and /o/. Most vowels are unrounded and /o/ is the only rounded vowel in Pendau. Pendau has no diphthongs.[8]

The high back unrounded vowel (/u/) changes to a labial-velar glide (/w/) when it comes before a syllable with no consonant in the onset position. When this happens, the labial-velar glide takes the place of the onset consonant, reducing the number of would-be syllables.[9]

Pendau has 19 consonant phonemes, although 'w' (which is not an underlying phoneme) appears in its written orthography There are five contrastive places of articulation and six contrastive manners of articulation. There are two affricates in Pendau, the voiceless dental sibilant affricate (/t̪ʃ/) and the voiced alveolar sibilant affricate (/dʒ/).[8]

In word-final positions, voiceless plosives are pronounced as unreleased allophones: e.g. the [p] in [api] becomes a [p̚] in [aɭap̚]. Other allophones in Pendau include the voiced dental nasal [n̪] becoming the syllabic dental [n̩] and the voiced velar nasal [ŋ] becoming the syllabic velar nasal [ŋ̩] before a homorganic obstruent such as in [n̩dau] and in [ŋ̩ka:t̪̚].[8]

The glottal stop (/ʔ/) is sometimes realized as creaky voice. It has been observed that "in place of a true stop, a very compressed form of creaky voice or some less extreme form of stiff phonation may be superimposed on the vocalic stream.[13] The creaky voice manifests on one or more of the contiguous vowels where the glottal stop would have been. For example, creaky voice is written with [V̰] in [riV̰uo], where creaky voice appears between [i] and [o] as one vowel transitions into the next vowel.

The syllabic template in Pendau is (C)V(C). Pendau is one of the few Sulawesi languages with a full system of final consonants (e.g. the neighboring Kaili languages only allow CV and V, while demonstrated syllable patterns in Pendau include VC and CVC).[15]

In the above example, /n/ in ndau behaves as a syllabic consonant.

In the table above, X means that the consonant can occupy the respective position in the syllable and + means that it is a marginal phoneme. In Pendau, /h/ is the sole marginal phoneme, and it is hypothesized to be borrowed from Indonesian loan words.

Stress always falls on the penultimate syllable and is unmarked. Words in Pendau require at least two syllables, which reflects this stress pattern. Some have described this process as "pitch accent" because the change in stress is accompanied by a change in pitch (as measured in Hz). However, Phil Quick, author of the A Grammar of the Pendau Language, states that "the use of 'pitch accent' should not be confused with languages such as Japanese in which 'pitch accent' is a term used to indicate a lexical contrast similar to tone language ... So technically then there are two types of pitch-accent languages, those such as Japanese where pitch-accent is phonemic, and those such as Pendau where pitch-accent is non-phonemic."[19]

Below is a table that lists all the verb classes in Pendau. All canonical verbs (besides stative verbs) require that the verb is prefixed with either the irrealis or realis mood. The subscripts A and P refers to whether the subject is the agent or patient.

[21]

Pendau uses clitics show possession (genitive case), completion, continuation, relative clauses, and location. Clitics are phonologically part of the word (e.g., a word with a clitic adheres to the stress patterns as if the whole unit were one word), but syntactically functions as their own grammatical word.[20]

Reduplication in Pendau is classified as either affixation or compounding.[20] Both full and partial reduplication are present in Pendau. Partial reduplication sometimes works in tandem with prefixation, as the prefix itself may be added and reduplicated instead of the reduplicating the base (see seseleo below). Reduplication is used for showing grammatical number, nominalization, and emphasis.[22]

Subject agreement only occurs with two abilitative verbs (i.e., verbs that show the ability of doing the action): ma'ule 'able' and matua 'capable.' These verbs themselves are prefixed with either the irrealis or realis mood.[26]

The examples below show matua with first person subject agreement

[27]

The basic word order in Pendau is SVO or VOS, with the former being more common. Verbal prefixes show what the semantic role is of the argument in the subject position (agent or patient).[28]

[29]

[29]

The inverse voice (VOS) can only be used with transitive verbs, and all transitive verbs can be inflected for the inverse voice. Intransitive verbs need to become transitive verbs through derivation before they can be in the inverse voice. Otherwise, the word order in Pendau (and the word order for all intransitive sentences) is SVO.[30]

Pendau is a prepositional language.[31] There are three prepositions: ila (ablative noun marker), ri= (locative noun phrase marker), and sono (comitative noun phrase marker).[32] Preposed markers can be both independent words and proclitics.

Preposition (ila) functioning as an independent word

[33]

Preposition (ri=) functioning as a proclitic

[34]