Mesqan (also Mäsqan or Meskan) is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken by the Gurage people in the Gurage Zone of Ethiopia. It belongs to the family's Ethiopian Semitic branch.
Phonology
Consonants
| Labial | Alveolar | Post- alveolar |
Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | lab. | plain | lab. | ||||||
| Nasal | m | mʷ | n | ɲ | |||||
| Stop/ Affricate |
voiceless | (p) | t | t͡ʃ | c | k | kʷ | ||
| voiced | b | bʷ | d | d͡ʒ | ɟ | g | ɡʷ | ||
| ejective | (pʼ) | tʼ | t͡ʃʼ | cʼ | kʼ | kʼʷ | |||
| Fricative | voiceless | f | fʷ | s | ʃ | ç | x | xʷ | h |
| voiced | (v) | z | ʒ | ||||||
| ejective | (sʼ) | ||||||||
| Rhotic | r | ||||||||
| Lateral | l | ||||||||
| Approximant | j | w | |||||||
- Sounds /p, pʼ, v, sʼ/ occur in loanwords, mainly from Amharic.
- /xʷ/ may also have an allophone of [hʷ].
- /b/ may have an allophone of [β] in postvocalic and intervocalic positions.
- /n/ may assimilate to [ŋ] when following a velar consonant.[3]
- /k, ɡ/ can also be heard as palatalized [kʲ, ɡʲ] when before front vowels.[4][5]
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | ɨ | u |
| Mid | e | ə | o |
| Open | a |
References
- ↑ Mesqan at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- ↑ "Modern Gurage Orthography Additions to Ethiopic Script" (PDF). unicode.org.
- ↑ Shafi, Ousman; Meyer, Ronny (2016). Mesqan.
- ↑ Eshetu, Meseret (2012). Tense, aspect and mood in Mesqan. Addis Ababa University. pp. 19–20.
- ↑ Getachew, Alemayehu (2011). Mesqan folktales: A contribution to the documentation of the Mesqan language. Addis Ababa University. pp. 10–11.
- Getachew, Alemayehu (2011). Mesqan folktales: A contribution to the documentation of the Mesqan language (MA thesis). Addis Ababa University.
Further reading
- Ousman Shafi; Ronny Meyer (2023). "Mesqan". In Ronny Meyer; Zelealem Leyew; Bedilu Wakjira (eds.). Oxford Handbook of Ethiopian Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 580–606.
