Template structure and vowel length in

a Berber secret language

The goal of this presentation is to investigate the templatic activity underlying

morphological operations in a Berber secret language, which can shed light on some
theoretical issues such as template structure and its effect on the phonological representation
of vowel length.
An outstanding issue in Tashlhiyt Berber phonology is the status of the short vowels
that appear in certain consonant clusters and their relation to the remaining vowels in the
language. Two conflicting hypotheses exist: one suggests that epenthetic schwas appear
between consonants (cf. Coleman 1996, 2001) and the other claims that these short vowels are
not epenthetic but mere transitional vocoids that have no syllabic role (cf. Dell & Elmedlaoui
2002). Our claim in this presentation is that these schwas are the straightforward result of the
association of one of the uncontroversial full vowels i, a, u to one skeletal position. We
embrace the hypothesis first proposed by Lowenstamm (1991) in the case of Ethiopian and
Moroccan Arabic and extended by Bendjaballah (2001) to Berber, which holds that peripheral
vowels are phonologically long in so that they connect to two skeletal positions. They reduce
to a short vowel such as schwa when they connect to only one position. Such a hypothesis, we
argue, underlies the representation of vowels in a secret language in Tashlhiyt Berber called
Tagnawt. We show that in this language (data are borrowed from Douchaïna 1998) a given
vocalic material, say /A/, surfaces as a full or short vowel depending on the number of the
slots that it fills in the template. For instance, a triconsonantal form such as skr “do” is
disguised such ajssakrwakr where each occurrence of the full vowel a has access to two
vocalic slots in the template. On the contrary, a quadriconsonantal form such as ggrml “be
crusty” is disguised as ajgg´rmlwaml where the medial vowel reduces to schwa [´], since it
has access to only one vocalic position. We also show that the template not only captures the
alternation of short and long vowels but also accounts for the variety of morphological
operations that the secret language uses.

References
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