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Notes on Two Languages in the Senufo Group: II. Sup'ide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

William E. Welmers
William E. Welmers*
Affiliation:
American Council of Learned Societies
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Extract

The informant for this material is a native of the village of Mulaso, French Sudan, about 25 miles west of Sikasso. A brief comparison of the speech of a Sikasso informant indicates that there is little dialect difference between the two places. One interesting difference noted is the apparent absence in Sikasso of a distinction between two morphotonemic classes of verbs which exists in Mulaso. Another brief comparison of the speech of an informant from some 45 miles northeast of Sikasso indicates considerable dialect difference; the range of phonetic variation within phonemes seems to be much less, and some differences in the phonemic system were observed. However, the latter informant and the Mulaso informant understood each other easily, and both insisted that their speech was ‘the same’. The precise extent of the Sup'ide area is, however, not known.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 26 , Issue 4-Part1: October-December , December 1950, pp. 494 - 531
Copyright
Copyright © 1950 by the Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 [This is the second of two related papers. The first, on Senadi, appeared in Lg. 26.126-46 (1950).—BB]

2 In proofreading this article I find that I have used /ẽ/ in the transcription of two words and one stem reconstructed from a word. Either I heard the forms incorrectly, or there is a phoneme /ẽ/ of rare occurrence, not shown in the vowel table. The forms in question are ‘fist’, ‘to saw’, and the stem from /fùkéná/ ‘a lamp’. The last of these may be the result of an incorrect analysis.

2a After this paper was written, evidence turned up that makes the recorded tones of this word suspect. The word /fàŋà/ ‘cloth’ or /mpà/ ‘sheep’ is a safer paradigm, and can be substituted for /mòfà/ in all examples.

3 Such a construction probably exists, but no records were made of it. A study of it might reinforce or weaken the equation referred to above.

4 After nouns only; after substitutes with mid tone, the tone here is low.

5 And noun-final mid* > high.

6 The stems /dyuo, pa, tyuo/ are recorded with mid tone after no object, not with the regular low tone; there is little chance of an error in these recordings. Since there is no other evidence of a pattern into which these three stems might fit, they can only, for the present, be specially noted as exceptional.

7 In §5.1.3 there is the following entry: stem /bànì/, present /bàni/, meaning ‘hurt’. Possibly both pairs are correct, one being transitive and one intransitive. If this is not true, the forms in the present section are more likely be correct than those in §5.1.3, since they were checked at a later date for tone.