Prosodically-conditioned vowel shortening in Chindali

Abstract

In Chindali [Bantu M21, northern Malawi and southern Tanzania], the augment vowel of noun classes 1 a, Sa, 9 and 10 exhibits allomorphic variation in length. In other noun classes, the vowel of the noun class prefix varies in length before NCinitial stems. The author demonstrates that, in both cases, potentially long vowels become shortened, except that they do so under different conditions: mora-count of the noun stem in the first case, lack of high tone (accent) on the prefix in the second.