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The possibilities for word-initials can be summed up in these possible syllables: V-, CV-, VC-, CVC-. Word-final syllables must always have an onset consisting of one consonant or a two-consonant cluster: -CV or -CCV. This also means that all words will end in a syllabic vowel, never a consonant
The final nasal, /ŋ/, of the prefix commonly becomes the homorganic nasal of the first consonant of the root which disappears or remains. This affix is used when it is necessary to make a normally transitive verb, a verb that commonly occurs with -en, -an or i-, intransitive for syntactic reasons.
Consonant-final words - which are generally CVC because of the size constraint that favours CV or CVC words - are often augmented by a final vowel. This process of vowel insertion happens in one of two contexts: (i) before a pause; (ii) at the end of a sentence.
Consider the following words: [múkskut] - fire [kúčiɫ] - knife; One can argue that word-final syllables with the shape CV or CVC (if the final consonant is a coronal obstruent) are treated as extrametrical, and therefore left unstressed.
For example, in the word zuǐba just mentioned, the final vowel may become a schwa [ə]. The coda (final consonant or offglide) of a weak syllable is often dropped (this is linked to the shorter, single-mora nature of weak syllables, as referred to above). If the dropped coda was a nasal consonant, the vowel may be nasalized.
Primary stress is word-final in Kʼicheʼ and two-year-old children favor the production of word-final syllables with the form CVC. Children do not consistently produce inflectional prefixes on nouns and verbs before they are four years old, although they consistently produce the status suffixes on verbs by the time they are two years old.
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Each of the consonantal phonemes occurs as the initial C in CV and CVC syllables, while each of the vowels occurs as the nucleus in the four syllable patterns. Any phoneme of the class /t k m n ŋ w z r/ may occur in the syllable and word final C position, while /p k w c ŋ w ' h/ are limited in their distribution in that they do not occur in ...