Dschang Syllable Structure and Moraic Aspiration

The syllable structure of Dschang is interesting for a variety of reasons. Most notable is the aspiration which can appear on most consonant types, including voiced stops. I shall argue that aspiration is best viewed as moraic, contributing to the weight of a syllable. An understanding of the syllable structure also gives valuable insights into the phonemic inventory and the distributional asymmetries, and helps to explain some curious morphophonemic vowel alternations in the imperative construction. Dschang is one of about ten Bamileke1 languages, spoken by over 300,000 people in Cameroon (Grimes 1988). The considerable interest in the language has focussed almost solely on tone, stemming from work by Hyman & Tadadjeu (1976). However, the language is also interesting for its syllable structure. The purpose of this paper is to give a detailed description of the syllable in Dschang (Bafou dialect) and show how syllable structure aids the understanding of a diverse range of diachronic, phonotactic and morphophonemic evidence. A striking property of Dschang syllables is aspiration, which can accompany most segments (including voiced stops) and which, I shall argue, does not occupy a position in the syllable onset. Aspiration behaves in a curious way in the morphophonology of the language, as illustrated in (1). As an aid to the reader, verb roots have been underlined. (1) Infinitive Imperative Gloss 8g! k g k! be intelligent 8gh gh fly nz! t z t! be heavy ntsh! tsh ! transplant Observe that the nasal prefix which marks the infinitive is not present in the imperative, and instead a low vowel suffix is added. The situation becomes more complex when we examine the CV roots shown in (2). Note that p and b are allophones. 1Bamileke is a subgroup of Grassfields Bantoid in the Niger-Congo language family (Watters & Leroy 1989:435). The primary difference between Grassfields and Narrow Bantu is that Grassfields languages have a much simpler morphology.