Paradigmatic saturation in Nuer

Abstract

Nouns in Nuer (Western Nilotic) have been presented as an extreme example of inflectional complexity, where a 'chaotic' distribution of suffixes combines with dozens of different stem modifications to yield dozens of inflection classes (Frank 1999, Baerman 2012. We show that all of the apparent surface variety can be reduced to a handful of operations. The proliferation of inflection classes is due to a property we call paradigmatic saturation: practically every combination of inflectional operations is attested, yielding the maximum variety with the minimum of means.*

Nuer

“…Lou Nuer has a voiceless glottal fricative phoneme. Western Nuer has voiceless fricative phonemes that occur at labial, dental, alveolar, palatal and velar places of articulation, and a voiced dental fricative phoneme (Baerman & Monich 2021). This paper presents the consonantal data as it occurs in the speech of a Lou Nuer speaker.…”

“…Here I transcribe the vowels on the basis of their phonetic properties. In the recent literature on the South Sudanese Nuer dialects (Baerman, Monich & Reid 2019; Reid 2019; Bond et al 2020; Monich 2020; Baerman & Monich 2021) these vowels are represented as /ɪ, i̤, e, e̤, ɛ, ʌ̤, a, a̤, ɔ, ɔ̤, o, o̤, ʊ, ṳ, ɪe, i̤e̤, ɛa, e̤a̤(ɛ̤a̤), ʊɔ, ṳɔ̤, ɔa, ɔ̤a̤/ based on their behaviour in morphophonology. Somewhat different vowel inventories are proposed for the Ethiopian Jikany Nuer (Faust & Grossman 2015; Faust 2017; Gjersøe 2019), most notably, the diphthongs /ea, e̤a̤(ɛ̤a̤)/ are not reported for this dialect.…”

“… 8 Studies by Baerman et al (2019), Reid (2019), Bond et al (2020), Monich (2020), Baerman & Monich (2021) represent the vowel length by adding extra graphemes as follows: short /ɔ, ɔa/, long /ɔɔ, ɔaa/, and overlong /ɔɔɔ, ɔaaa/. Gjersøe (2019) represents the three-way vowel length contrast as short /ɔ/, half-long /ɔˑ/, and long /ɔː/. …”