Tennet language


Tennet is a Surmic language spoken by the Tennet people in South Sudan. The Tennet home area is a group of fifteen villages at the northern part of Eastern Equatoria state, 65 kilometers northeast of Torit.

Distribution

Tennet is spoken in fourteen villages, these villages are Imilwanit, Ngaalovi, Itir, Nyaaro, Leteji Ngaanlobok, Loudum, Le̱le̱, Lovi, Tare, Lobele, Imedu, Momoi and Lovirang. The major town for Tennet is Arilo, of Lafon County, Eastern Equatoria State.

Phonology

Consonants

Most consonants are members of a fortis/lenis pair, and that fortis may be realized phonetically in several ways: lengthening, change from ingressive to egressive, trilling, devoicing, and fricative hardening. The fortis counterpart of the voiced velar fricative has been omitted. In Randal, the consonant chart includes it to show the consonants in the Tennet orthography. The fortis counterpart of is omitted here because it is phonetically identical to the fortis counterpart of .

Vowels

Tennet has five vowels and five corresponding vowels. The vowels are /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/, and in the current orthography, vowels are marked with an underline. Tongue height may vary slightly without affecting the quality of a vowel, so unlike certain West African languages, the /e/, for example, may actually be slightly lower than the /e/. The feature spreads from right to left, so a suffix will cause the vowels in a stem to become . Tennet uses to mark lexical and grammatical distinctions.
Any of the ten vowels may be lengthened. In the orthography, vowels are doubled to show length.
Tennet has two level tones and a falling tone. A rising tone is treated as a low-high sequence, because it occurs only on long vowels. In the current orthography the high tone is marked with an acute accent, falling is marked with a circumflex, and low is unmarked. Tone often marks grammatical relations and occasionally marks lexical distinctions.

Morphology

Like its closer Surmic relatives, Tennet uses multiple strategies to mark number on nouns.
  • Singular suffix: Nouns that refer to things that usually occur in groups
  • Plural suffix: Nouns referring to things that usually occur singly
  • Singular suffix to mark singular and plural suffix to mark plural
  • Tone change
  • Stem change
The number marking system is quite similar to that of Murle, for which Arensen has proposed semantically based categories to group nouns that use the same strategy for marking number.
Tennet has a marked nominative system, where a noun takes a suffix when it is the subject of either a transitive or intransitive verb. A noun serving as a direct object is unmarked, and so are citation forms.
In an equational clause with an implicit "be" verb, both nouns are left unmarked.
Like other Surmic languages, Tennet uses a modified vigesimal counting system. "Six" is derived from "five and one," "seven" from "five and two," etc. "Ten" is a new word, followed by "ten and one," "ten and two," up to "ten and five and four," after which is a new word for "twenty," which means "a person". "Forty" is "two people," sixty is "three people," etc.

Syntax and Typology

Tennet has a basic VSO word order. As is the case with other Surmic languages, Tennet's word order for interrogative clauses is typologically surprising. Greenberg's Universal 12 predicts that for VSO languages, interrogative words will be sentence-initial, but Tennet and its relatives have sentence-final interrogative words.
The language has a category of words that have been analyzed as postpositions. If that is what they are, Tennet syntax contains another typological anomaly, since Greenberg's Universal 9 predicts prepositions for VSO languages. However, these postposition candidates also have some noun-like characteristics, and certain constructions containing indisputable nouns parallel the apparent postpositional constructions quite nicely.