UC Berkeley PhonLab Annual Report

As it is well known, noun class prefixes are low tone in Narrow Bantu and classes 1, 3, 4, 6(a), 9,and 10 have nasals (Meeussen 1967). However, just outside Narrow Bantu, noun class prefixesare usually high tone and the nasals are typically missing. A dichotomy is found in GrassfieldsBantu where Eastern Grassfields resembles Narrow Bantu but the Ring and Momo sub-groups ofWestern Grassfields have high tone prefixes and lack nasals except sporadically. Drawing ondata from Babanki and other Ring languages, we show that this relationship is not accidental. Ina number of contexts where we expect a high tone prefix, a stem-initial NC cluster requires thatit rather be low. We provide some speculations in this paper as to why nasals should beassociated with low tone, an issue that has not been fully addressed in the literature on consonanttypes and tone.