In historical linguistics, Klingenheben's law is a set of four sound changes governing the lenition (softening) of certain syllable-final consonants in earlier forms of the Hausa language. The four sound changes affect the velar stops, coronal stops, labial obstruents, and the bilabial nasal. Only the first two are universal to all dialects of the language. The affected consonants were lenited in syllable-final position when followed by a syllable-initial consonant. When other morphophonological changes affected the position of that consonant within a syllable, namely shifting it from the end of one syllable to the beginning of the following syllable, the law no longer applied, leading to phonological alternation. Klingenheben's law has been employed as an example of geminate inalterability, a process which explains the exceptional behavior of geminate consonants in certain contexts. It is considered one of the two most important sound laws governing Hausa's consonantal inventory and syllable structure, the other being the law of codas in reduplication; these two phenomena were once considered part of the same process. The law is named for the German Africanist August Klingenheben who first described the process in the late 1920s.
Background
Hausa is a Chadic language spoken by about 20 million people in the Sahel in Central and West Africa, with most speakers living in northern Nigeria. A part of the larger Afroasiatic language family, it is distantly related to languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, and Somali. At the time of the law's first description, it was unclear that Hausa numbered among the Chadic languages. In an article for the 1927/1928 issue of the Zeitschrift für Eingeborenen-Sprachen ('Journal for Indigenous Languages'), the German Africanist August Klingenheben described processes he had discovered, which he termed collectively as Silbenauslautgesetze ('syllable-final [sound] laws'). Klingenheben proposed this sound law after analyzing the irregularity of the language's surface representation. By positing the historical sound changes contained within the law, Klingenheben could make sense of the contrasting forms. Along with the law of codas in reduplication, Klingenheben's law is considered one of the two most impactful sound laws on Hausa's modern consonant inventory and syllable structure. The two processes are closely linked; earlier linguists, including Klingenheben, considered them to be part of the same process because they both occur in syllable coda only and lenite coronal obstruents to [r]. However, the law of codas in reduplication creates geminates from velars and labials instead of [w] and, while it has affected historical sound changes, it is still productive in modern Hausa. Klingenheben's law has been described as Hausa's best-known sound change.
Description
Klingenheben's law describes a series of four historical sound changes in Hausa which lenited – in other words, softened – its syllable-final consonants. When the consonant is found in the syllable onset, the surface and underlying representations of the sound match, but when the underlying consonant is found in coda, it is converted to its alternative surface form. For example, the infix -àa-, found in some plural words, affects the position of the alternating phoneme within the syllable by shifting the initial syllable's coda consonant to the onset of a new following syllable. In other words, the insertion of affixes can shift the position of the consonant from the syllable's end to the syllable's beginning, affecting the way that sound is pronounced based on that context, or alternation.
Velar rule The velar rule affected Hausa's velar stops – /k/, /g/, and /kʼ/ – and probably their labialized forms – /kʷ/, /gʷ/, and /kʷʼ/ – which became the semivowel consonant [w] in syllable-final position. A clear example is ɓáunáa ('buffalo'), which is derived from an earlier form *ɓáknáa. There is a syllable boundary between the /k/ and the /n/ in this earlier form and, since the /k/ is a velar stop in syllable-final position, this stop was converted to [w]. In contrast, the plural form ɓákàanée contains the long vowel -àa- as an infix between /k/ and /n/, reorganizing the syllable structure. In this plural form, the /k/ is positioned at the start of the syllable -kàa- and is thus not affected by Klingenheben's law. While the velar rule does occur in word-final position, it is relatively rare.
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