An Aslian origin for the word gibbon

Abstract

An Aslian origin for the word gibbon Lexis, 15 | 2020 An Aslian origin for the word gibbon Lexis, 15 | 2020 10 The most phonemically reliable forms are probably those of the wordlists of the archive of the Volkswagen Foundation's DOBES (Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen) programme: kəbɔɲ 'gibbon' [Burenhult 2008] and kbɔɲ 'gibbon' [Burenhult 2009]. These forms support Endicott's [1979] rendering of the open back vowel /ɔ/ and the final palatal nasal /ɲ/. The phonetic surface representation of the word is probably along the lines of [kəˈbɔ iɟ ɲ] and a purely phonemic representation should probably be /kbɔɲ/ since the vowel of the first syllable is likely to be epenthetic and not have phonemic status. The lexeme shall thus be referred to as kbɔɲ for the remainder of this article.