Paicî is the most widely spoken of the two dozen languages on the main island of
New Caledonia
)
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, image_map = New Caledonia on the globe (small islands magnified) (Polynesia centered).svg
, map_alt = Location of New Caledonia
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. It is spoken in a band across the center of the island, from
Poindimié to
Ponérihouen.
Phonology
Paicî has a rather simple inventory of consonants, compared to other languages of New Caledonia, but it has an unusually large number of nasal vowels. Paicî syllables are restricted to
C V.
[Gordon & Maddieson (]1996
File:1996 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: A bomb explodes at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, set off by a radical anti-abortionist; The center fuel tank explodes on TWA Flight 800, causing the plane to crash and killing everyone o ...
).
Consonants
The palatal stops could be considered affricates because they occur with a heavily fricated release. The lateral and tap do not occur word-initially, except in a few loanwords and the prefix ''they''.
Because nasal stops are always followed by nasal vowels, but prenasalized stops are always followed by oral vowels, it might be argued that nasal and prenasalized stops are
allophonic
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ' ...
, which would reduce the Paicî consonant inventory to 13.
Vowels
Paicî has a symmetrical system of ten oral vowels, all found both long and short without any significant difference in quality, and seven nasal vowels, some of which may also be long and short. Because sequences of two short vowels may carry two tones but long vowels are restricted to carrying one tone, they appear to be phonemically long vowels rather than sequences.
Tones
Like its neighbour
Cèmuhî, Paicî is one of the few
Austronesian languages which have developed
contrastive tone,
[Rivierre (]1974
Major events in 1974 include the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis and the resignation of United States President Richard Nixon following the Watergate scandal. In the Middle East, the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War determined politics; ...
). involving three registers: high, mid, low. Additionally, there are vowels with no inherent tone, whose tone is determined by their environment. Words commonly have the same tone on all vowels, so tone may belong to the word rather than the syllable.
Notes
References
*
*
* Rivierre, Jean-Claude. 1983. ''Dictionnaire paicî - français, suivi d'un lexique français - paicî''. Paris : Société d'Etudes linguistiques et anthropologiques de France, 1983. 375p.
External links
Alphabet and pronunciationat ''Omniglot''
(website of
LACITO-
CNRS
The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe.
In 2016, it employed 31,63 ...
)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Paici Language
New Caledonian languages
Languages of New Caledonia
Tonal languages in non-tonal families