Talk:Dahalo language

Number of speakers
The first paragraph of the article says 3000 people:

Dahalo is an endangered South Cushitic language spoken by about 3000 people in Kenya.

However, the box to the right says 400. Which is correct? Mga 01:25, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Good catch. There are at most 400 speakers now (cf. Brenzinger 1992, Tosco 1992). I've changed it. &mdash; mark &#9998; 07:51, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Airstream mechanism
It says in the article that Dahalo is perhaps the only language to employ all four airstream mechanisms used in human language. What about Xhosa for example? --Midjungards (talk) 15:02, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
 * You are right, Xhosa uses plosion, implosion, ejective, and velaric mechanisms. I'll edit the sentence. (Taivo (talk) 16:54, 4 March 2008 (UTC))
 * That might be a theoretical difference. Xhosa is often represented with the ejectives being phonetic detail. However, you can't do that with Dahalo. kwami (talk) 18:55, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Personally, I think that the "X language is unique" comments are pretty lame in linguistics. Just as soon as one is published, it's contradicted in the literature by half a dozen people who say, "Uh, no, this language does that, too."  (I've written "Uh, no" articles myself.)  Since some sources treat the Xhosa ejectives as subphonemic and others treat them as phonemic, it's best to take the "uniqueness" tag off Dahalo I think.  Zulu also has the same four way distinction as Xhosa (although the ejectives may be subphonemic there as well).  But within Khoisan, !Xu also has a phonemic four-way. (Taivo (talk) 20:02, 4 March 2008 (UTC))
 * It has implosives? Do you have refs? Or were you referring to s.t. else? kwami (talk) 01:49, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Snyman, Jan W. 1970.  An Introduction to the !Xu (!Kung) Language.  Cape Town:  A.A. Balkema. (Sorry my response is so much later than your question, I must have been ignoring my watchlist or something.) (Taivo (talk) 05:13, 24 April 2008 (UTC))

Question on IPA symbol in consonant chart
The consonant chart uses a slightly different symbol for the alveolar apical plosives that is not the symbol usually used for alveolar plosives. For example, the alveolar apical voiceless plain plosive, the symbol used is t̠. Perhaps the proper pronounciation of that phoneme could be explained, or a wiki link created to an explanatory page (if one already exists). Thanks. &mdash; Jclu (talk) 16:51, 29 January 2009 (UTC)


 * The consonant chart looks like it was taken straight from the Maddieson et al. article in the references section (I've added a link) - the apical diacritic is the same one they use. They refer to the stops as dental & alveolar, though (not apical & laminal); that may be why they used a non-standard symbol? WmGB (talk) 19:15, 29 January 2009 (UTC)


 * So the symbol denotes apical pronounciation? Thanks; good to know. &mdash; Jclu (talk) 22:30, 29 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Actually, it's a retraction symbol, the point being that it's further back than the laminal dentals. They say that these are almost retroflex, that is, they're verging on post-alveolar, so the retraction symbol is appropriate. kwami (talk) 10:37, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

Missing Reference
Tosco 1992? This needs a complete reference. (Taivo (talk) 12:29, 13 February 2009 (UTC))

Endangered?
It seems given the number of speakers and the fact that children are not learning it, "moribound" may be a more accurate characterization than "endangered". Does anyone have a source for either one? Joefromrandb (talk) 05:35, 6 January 2012 (UTC)


 * It's moribund once children are no longer learning it. I'm not sure that's the case, though it would seem that there are not very many children learning it. — kwami (talk) 05:39, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Consonant inventory
(Cont'd from User talk:Tropylium) Yes, you're right, just pooling the two accounts leads to some duplication (although it's Tosco's /tʃʼ/ that Ladefoged & co analyze as a plain alveolars, not /tsʼ/). I considered instead presenting their intersection but that runs into the issue that several consonants were probably not caught by L&co due to, by their admittance, a fairly small sampling of the language. They also seem to misrepresent Tosco in claiming that his /v/ would be just a variant of /w/.

You can check out his paper on Academia.edu, BTW.

As for "inflated", Tosco basically appears to argue that there is no native Dahalo phonology any more (all speakers being apparently bilingual+); i.e. loanwords from the main contact languages have ceased to be nativized in any way and are brought over in their basic Swahili, Oromo etc. forms. "As is probably the case in any bi- or multilingual community, the boundaries between the systems, initially strongly perceived by the speakers, gradually fade away (…) [A]s more and more loans creep in, they are simply stored, unanalyzed." The point is that Dahalo is at any rate full of loanword phonemes, and differences in the inventory will result from what other languages any particular informant speaks. A better word than "inflated" might be findable.

The "more original verb-final" system would seem to be a partially historical analysis though. -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 12:36, 31 December 2013 (UTC)


 * If phonemes depend on what languages people speak, as you noted, then that is indeed an argument for the inventory being inflated. But if they've been assimilated by people who do not speak the source language, they're now part of the inventory.  But Tosco's comment is a valuable one, which I think we should add to the text.
 * I thought /tʼ/ was /tsʼ/. Ladefoged has both /tʼ/ and /tʃʼ/, does he not? (Though /tʃʼ/ is marginal; maybe he mentioned it somewhere but did not include it in the table?).  What reason do we have to think L misrepresented T on /v/?  I remember having some reservations about Tosco, such as listing /ᵑʇ/ as prenasalized. — kwami (talk) 20:26, 31 December 2013 (UTC)