Lower Sorbian language: Difference between revisions
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|family=[[Indo-European language family|Indo-European]]<br> [[Slavic languages|Slavic]]<br> [[West Slavic languages|West |
|family=[[Indo-European language family|Indo-European]]<br> [[Slavic languages|Slavic]]<br> [[West Slavic languages|West]]<br> [[Sorbian languages|Sorbian]]<br> '''Lower Sorbian''' |
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Revision as of 04:55, 5 September 2005
error: ISO 639 code is required (help)
Lower Sorbian (dolnoserbski) is a minority language spoken in eastern Germany in the historical province of Lower Lusatia, today part of Brandenburg. It is one of the two literary Sorbian languages, the other being Upper Sorbian.
Phonology
Consonants
The consonant phonemes of Lower Sorbian are as follows:
| Bilabial | Labiodental | Dental | Alveolar | Alveolo-palatal | Postalveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop | p b pʲ bʲ |
t d | k g kʲ gʲ |
||||||
| Affricate | ts | tɕ dʑ | tʃ dʒ | ||||||
| Nasal | m mʲ |
n | nʲ | ||||||
| Fricative | f v fʲ vʲ |
s z | ɕ ʑ | ʃ ʒ | x | h | |||
| Approximant | r rʲ |
j | |||||||
| Lateral approximant | lʲ |
Lower Sorbian has both final devoicing and regressive voicing assimilation:
- /dub/ "oak" is pronounced [dup]
- /susedka/ "(female) neighbor" is pronounced [susetka]
- /litsba/ "number" is pronounced [lidzba]
The postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ is assimilated to [ɕ] before /tɕ/:
- /ʃtɕit/ "protection" is pronounced [ɕtɕit]
Vowels
The vowel phonemes are as follows:
| Monophthongs | Front | Central | Back |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | ɨ | u |
| Open-mid | ɛ | ɔ | |
| Open | a | ||
| Diphthongs | Centering | Ending in /j/ |
Ending in /w/ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting close | iɪ | ij ɨj uj | iw ɨw uw |
| Starting mid | ej ɔj | ɛw ow | |
| Starting open | aj | aw |
Stress
Stress in Lower Sorbian normally falls on the first syllable of the word:
In loanwords, stress may fall on any of the last three syllables:
- internat /intɛrˈnat/ "boarding school"
- kontrola /kɔnˈtrɔlʲa/ "control"
- september /sɛpˈtɛmbɛr/ "September"
- policija /pɔˈlʲitsija/ "police"
- organizacija /ɔrganʲiˈzatsija/ "organization"
Orthography
The Sorbian alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet but uses diacritics such as acute accent and caron. The standard character encoding for the Lower Sorbian alphabet is ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2).