Afenmai (Afemai), Yekhee , or Iyekhe , is an Edoid language spoken in Edo State , Nigeria by Afenmai people . Not all speakers recognize the name Yekhee ; some use the district name Etsako .
7-559: Igue is a clan of the Afemai or Afenmai ethnic group who inhabit the hilly areas and valley of the Owan East Local Government Area of Edo State of Nigeria. The Igue Clan are residents in two areas, that is on the hills and in the valley. The area on the hills is known as Igue-Oke, while the area in the valley is called Igue-Sale. Their postal code is 313106 which is also shared with Aiyetoro Camp . This article about
14-434: A Nigerian ethnic group is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Afenmai Previously the name used by British colonial administration was Kukuruku , supposedly after a battle cry "ku-ku-ruku", now considered derogatory. Afenmai is unusual in reportedly having a voiceless tapped fricative as the "tense" equivalent of the "lax" voiced tap /ɾ/ (compare [aɾ̞̊u] 'hat' and [aɾu] 'louse' ), though
21-491: A single /i/ , as in /itsi/ 'pig' ( [itsi] ~ [itʃi] ). The other alveolar consonants do not have this variation, unless the triggering environment is provided within a prosodic word: /odzi/ 'crab' ( [odzi] in citation form) > /odzi oɣie/ 'the king's crab' ( [odʒoɣje] ). (The sounds transcribed with ⟨ ʃ ʒ ɲ ⟩ may actually be closer to [ɕ ʑ nʲ] .) Apart from /p ts dz θ/ , these consonants appear in all dialects of Afenmai investigated by Elimelech (1976). /p/
28-464: A spectrogram. /kː ɡː/ are likewise twice as long as /x ɣ/ . However, alveolar /t/ is only slightly longer than dental /θ/ , and while /v/ is longer than /ʋ/ , that's to be expected for a fricative compared to an approximant. The postalveolar consonants are allophones of the alveolars before /i/ plus another vowel, where /i/ would otherwise become [j] , as in /siesie/ [ʃeʃe] 'to be small'. It addition, /ts/ optionally becomes [tʃ] before
35-557: Is other descriptions it is described simply as a fricative and analyzed as the "lax" equivalent of the "tense" voiceless stop /t/ . Etsako, a dialect of Edo itself, has its own dialects which are broadly divided into the Iyekhe and Agbelọ dialects, with the Iyekhe dialect being the more widely spoken. Vowels are /i e ɛ a ɔ o u/ . Long vowels and the large number of diphthong in the language are derived from sequences of short vowels, often from
42-623: The contraction of such a long vowel or diphthong. Rising tones are rather uncommon, as they tend to be replaced by high, low or mid. Consonants of the Ekpheli dialect are: The consonants marked long have been analyzed in various ways, including 'tense' or 'fortis' and paired up with 'lax' or 'lenis' partners, though there is no phonological basis for grouping the supposed 'long' consonants together, or for partnering them with particular 'short' consonants. The clear cases are /k͡pː ɡ͡bː mː/ , which are twice as long as /k͡p ɡ͡b m/ but otherwise identical in
49-450: The optional elision of /l/ . Afenmai has a complex system of morphotonemic alterations based on two phonemic tones, high and low. At the surface level there are five distinctive tones: high, low, falling, rising and mid. Mid tone is the result of downstep of a high tone after a low tone. The contour tones (falling and rising) either occur on long vowels or diphthongs, from a sequence of high+low or low+high, or on short vowels produced from
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