The Tarama language is a Japonic language spoken on the islands of
Tarama and nearly depopulated
Minna
Minna is a city in Middle Belt Nigeria. It is the capital city of Niger State, one of Nigeria's 36 federal states. It consists of two major ethnic groups: the Gbagyi and the Nupe.
History
Archaeological evidence suggests settlement in t ...
, two of the
Miyako Islands
The (also Miyako Jima group) are a group of islands in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan, belonging to the Ryukyu Islands. They are situated between the Okinawa Island and Yaeyama Islands.
In the early 1870s, the population of the islands was estim ...
of Japan. It is closely related to
Miyakoan, but intelligibility is low. It is only spoken by elderly people.
Phonology
Vowels
Tarama has four main vowels, and three marginal vowels found in a restricted set of words.
is between voiceless consonants, otherwise after plosives, and elsewhere:
: 'person', 'yellow', 'right'
The sequences , , , do not occur. They have changed to , , and ().
Consonants
Tarama does have voiced stops:
The 'l' is a
retroflex lateral flap, also found in the
Irabu language (Jarosz p. 43). occur as
syllable coda
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological " ...
s, as in ''pail'' 'to grow' (Japanese ''haeru''), ''psks'' 'to pull' (Japanese ''hiku'').
The two nasals may be syllabic, as in ''mm'' 'potato' and ''nna'' 'rope'. 'Onsets' include geminate consonants, as in ''ssam'' 'loose' and ''ffa'' 'child'. Otherwise, the only consonant clusters are /Cj/, as in ''kjuu'' 'today', ''sjata'' 'sugar'. Sonorants can end syllables and words, as in ''kan'' 'crab', ''mim'' 'ear', and ''tul'' 'bird'. Vowel sequences include long vowels Vː and the 'diphthongs' Vi, and Vɨ. This structure has been analyzed as a syllable, but initial geminate consonants, long vowels and diphthongs are all bimoraic, and codas are moraic as well, so that e.g. ''ssam'' is three moras (. A phonological word must be at least two moras long.
Orthography
References
External links
Miyako dialect dictionary, Okinawa Center of Language Study* Aleksandra Jarosz
Nikolay Nevskiy's Miyakoan dictionary(PhD dissertation on
Nikolai Nevsky's draft manuscript dictionary of Miyakoan)
{{Languages of Japan
Ryukyuan languages
Miyako Islands