|
Ivory Coast - West Atlantic Cultures (730 words) |
 | Kru languages are a subgroup within the Kwa branch of the Niger-Congo language family, related to those of the Akan and lagoon peoples to their east. |
| Kru cultures generally lack the centralization characteristic of the Akan to the east. |
| The Bété, the largest Kru society, are probably the descendants of groups pushed southward from savanna woodland to forested areas by warfare to the north. |
| Change as Universals (5548 words) |
| For instance, the fact that all languages have oral vowel phonemes and only some languages have nasal vowel phonemes is due to the fact that nasal vowels develop out of oral vowels in the context of a nasal consonant, which subsequently is lost. |
| Greenberg’s brilliant discovery was that in unrelated families and languages, parts or all of this path of change are attested, and furthermore that the progression along the path is unidirectional. |
| More languages preclude /h/ from codas than allow it (see [iv]), but a significant minority not only allows /h/ there, but seems to favor it in the sense that it is one of a small set of allowed coda consonants, as shown in (ii). |
Feeds |
Contact