User:Nno700/sandbox

The Jahai language is an endangered language that is spoken among the indigenous community in the montane rainforests of the Malay Peninsula. It is classified as a 6B endangered language and it estimated that the language is spoken by around 1,000 indigenous natives. Jahai belongs to the Mon Khmer language family, a sub-section of the Aslian and Austro-Asiatic language family. The language is not a written language. In recent years, there has been a movement of native Jahai speakers to assimilate themselves to the Malay community or any larger Aslian language.

Vowels
There are 16 vowel phonemes in the Jahai language. Of these, 9 are oral and 7 are nasal. There exist 5 front vowels: /i/, /e/, /ɛ/, /ĩ/, /ɛ̃/;  6 central vowels: /ɨ/, /ə/, /a/, /ɨ̃/, /ə̃/, /ã/; and 5 back vowels: /u/, /o/,   /ɔ/, /ũ/, /ɔ̃/. The two tables below display the oral and nasal vowel phonemes in the IPA chart. 19,20

Consonants
There are 20 consonant phonemes in the Jahai language. There are five contrastive places of articulation and six contrastive manners. The table below displays all consonant phonemes in the Jahai language in the IPA chart. 23

Syllable Structure
Syllables in Jahai maximally has a simple onset, nucleus, and simple coda or [CVC]. These syllables can be divided into light and heavy syllables. Light syllables include the form [CV] while heavy syllables include a [CVC] form, or in other words, light syllables are considered open while heavy syllables are closed. The vowel nucleus is either non-predictable prespecified (/CV/, /CVC/) or predictable and underspecified (/C/, /CVC/). These syllables can be further categorized into either half or full syllables. Half syllables do not contain a prespecified vowel nucleus /C/ while all others are full syllables: /CV/, /CC/, /CVC/. These syllable distinctions are highlighted in the chart below. 29

Stress
The Jahai language has a non-contrastive stress that automatically falls on the last syllable of the word. 38

Tone
Research has suggested that here have not been sufficient pitch contrasts and that contrastive pairs have either contrasting vowel quality or contrastive final consonants as a replacement. 38

= Morphology =

Affixation
The process of affixation involves the creation or re-invention of a syllable, causing the prior monosyllabic form to change into disyllabic or sequisyllabic; more specifically Jahai's affixation changes syllables from half to full or from light to heavy. The affixation process of Jahai involves three unique determining factors.1. The domain of the attachment 2. The structure of the base to the attached affix 3. The degree of phonologically prespecified material in the affix. These factors form a spectrum called 'base dependence'. 46,47,62

Note: Different allomorphes of the same morpheme may have different modes of dependence. 46,47,62

The examples below portray a couple of the different prefixes.

Underspecified Affixation/Partial Reduplication
Underspecified affixes are not fully prespecified. Due to this, Jahai copies its phonemic content from the final CVC string from the base. In other cases, affixes could be completely unspecified and are therefore composed entirely of segments from the final CVC base. Below is an example of an underspecified affix. This process is referred to as Coda Copy. 49-50

Infixation
Infixation is the process of adding a morpheme that lies in the center or near center of a root.

Ex. ckwɨk ‘speech’ → ckwɨk ‘act of talking’

The infix  is a nominaliser that “make verbs behave syntactically like ordinary nouns” 60

Cliticisation
Cliticisation involves bound morphemes that are attached to either clauses, phrases, or other group of words. The example below demonstrates the use of the clitic ha= which attaches in the form clitic=[clause]. In Jahai, clitics can range in their location of a word and therefore can either by hosted by the first constituent of the NP or clause, verbs, the core, or any other constituent. In this specific case, the clitic is hosted by the first section of the clause. The examples below portray a variety of clitics with different locations of attachment. 65-7.

Total Reduplication
Total Reduplication is the process in which the entire base of the word is copied and placed to the left of the original base. 64-5

Ex. /mεj/ ‘what’ → /mεj-mεj/ ‘whatever’ 65

Ex. /kɟeŋ/ 'to listen' → /kɟeŋ-kɟeŋ/ 'to keep on sleeping' 65

Ex. /pagiʔ/ 'morning' → /pagiʔ-pagiʔ/ 'various mornings' 65

Common Clauses

 * The Jahai language has a basic word order of S(SUBJ:AGR) V(DIRECT OBJECT)  (OBLIQUE ARGUMENT), where the S is optional while S=AGR is not. 127

Permuted Arguments
This type of clause “does not require an obligatory preverbal subject-making pronoun” 130. The basic word order in common clauses can be disrupted through an "optional postverbal prepositional phrase" or other elements that can occur in between the verb and subject. (See Example 1) Or, “a noun phrase can represent the direct object in clause-initial position." (See Example 2) Below are two examples of the SVO word order in Jahai 130

Adjuncts
Adjuncts are grammatically used to alter or modify the meaning of a word. Adjuncts are not considered arguments of a verb.They usually directly precede the verb or post-arguments of the verb. Adjuncts in Jahai will never occur between the preceding subject maker or interrupt the subject maker and its preceding subject. The example below portrays an adjunct in Jahai. 131

Detached Phrases
Detached Phrases occur when phrases are separated by a pause. These pauses may occur before and after the clause. These two different detached phrases can be referred to as the left-detached phrase and the right-detached phrase, both of which serve different pragmatic functions. The left-detached phrases are used for topicalization while the right-detached phrases are used to specify. Below is an example of a left-detached phrase and an example of a right-detached phrase. 132-3