OLAC Record oai:sil.org:56015

Metadata
Title:		ꞌBëlï Phonology, Tone and Orthography
Abstract:		ꞌBëlï, a Nilo-Saharan Language of South Sudan, uses tone as the only distinctive feature to differentiate meaning in nearly 20% of words. The functional load of grammatical tone is also very high in that at least seven prepositions are in tone minimal pairs with body part nouns, and three relative clause connectors are in tone minimal pairs with demonstratives. Even so, with four simple spelling rules, the ꞌBëlï are able to disambiguate 75% of lexical tone distinctions and all grammatical tone distinctions in writing. These rules essentially mark grammatical category rather than tone, and involve doubled vowels, underlined vowels, hyphens and commas.
Contributor (author):		Stirtz, Timothy M.
Date (W3CDTF):		2014
Description (URI):		http://www.sil.org/resources/archives/56015
Extent:		34 pages
Identifier (URI):		http://www.sil.org/resources/archives/56015
		http://www.sil.org/resources/publications/entry/56015
Is Part Of:		SIL Electronic Working Papers 2014-002
Is Version Of (URI):		oai:sil.org:55968
Language:		English
Language (ISO639):		eng
Publisher:		SIL International
Subject:		Beli (Sudan) language
		lexical tone; grammatical tone; tone functional load; tone minimal pairs; orthographic representation of tone; orthographical marking of grammatical category; ATR; morphophonology
Subject (ISO639):		blm
Type (DCMI):		Text
Type (OLAC):		language_description
OLAC Info
Archive:		SIL Language and Culture Archives
Description:		http://www.language-archives.org/archive/sil.org
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for OLAC format
GetRecord:		Pre-generated XML file
OAI Info
OaiIdentifier:		oai:sil.org:56015
DateStamp:		2013-04-27
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for simple DC format
Search Info
Citation:		Stirtz, Timothy M. 2014. SIL Electronic Working Papers 2014-002.
Terms:		area_Africa area_Europe country_GB country_SS dcmi_Text iso639_blm iso639_eng olac_language_description
Inferred Metadata
Country:		South Sudan
Area:		Africa