For those unable to attend in person, you are welcome to join us virtually over Zoom.
A number of Berber languages in Morocco and Algeria have a phonemic opposition between labialized and non-labialized velar and uvular consonants, for example Tashlhiyt (Ridouane 2014: 213):
i-kla ‘he spent the day’ - i-kʷla ‘he ornamented’
ngi ‘flow!’ - ngʷi ‘delouse!’
xlan ‘the were deserted’ - xʷlan ‘they were crazy’
ɣi ‘here’ - ɣʷi ‘hold!’
Especially for Tashlhiyt, this subject has been studied extensively in the theoretical literature (among others, El Medlaoui 1995; Bensoukas 2014). The historical background is less well-studied.
Historically speaking, there are good reasons to consider Tashlhiyt (etc) labialization an innovation. Many other Berber languages have only one labialized consonant, ggʷ, which functions as the long (tense, geminate) counterpart to w. This relationship between w and ggʷ seems to be very old in the language family. If we would assume that the more extensive labialization as found in Tashlhiyt and a couple of other language is original, it seems difficult to envisage a delabialization process that would target all consonants, except those cases of ggʷ that are tensed w’s.
It has long been suggested that Tashlhiyt (etc) labialization could go back to an ancient rounded vowel, whose labial feature was transfered to velar and uvular consonants (e.g., Prasse 1975: 224). This could be part of the general process of neutralization and reduction of central vowels in northern Berber. In Dr. Kossmann's 1999 Essai sur la phonologie du proto-berbère, he tried to show this, based on the evidence from Berber languages that maintain a two-way contrast in the central vowel system, opposing /ə/ and /ă/ ([ɐ]). In hindsight, Dr. Kossmann does not think that the arguments, based on nominal plural patterns, were really decisive.
In this talk, Dr. Kossmann will discuss Tashlhiyt dialects of the southern Anti-Atlas (Nakano 1974; 1994–1998; Destaing 1920) that provide different, more conclusive, evidence for a correlation between absence of labialization and the earlier presence of *ă, and presence of labialization and the earlier presence of *ə.
