The Gulf of Guinea creoles (GGCs) exhibit a number of cases of initial vowel agglutination to etymologically consonant-initial words in the lexifier, Portuguese. This property is especially common in Lung’ie (Principense). Comparing agglutinated items in the four GGCs not only sheds light on their diachronic development, it also shows the linguistic compromise made between the different strata that gave rise to this feature. It will be argued that prosthetic vowels are phonetically calqued on the Portuguese definite article system, which bleached and became generalized as something else than a gender/number system, whereas the African contribution consists of creating vowel-initial items that are guided by rules of vowel harmony.
Bandeira, Manuele, Gabriel Antunes de Araujo & Thomas Finbow
2022. The Gulf of Guinea Proto-Creole and Its Daughter Languages: From Liquid Consonants to Complex Onsets and Vowel Lengthening. Journal of Language Contact 14:3 ► pp. 524 ff.
2015. Retention and Attrition of Umbundu in São Tomé and Príncipe. Sage Open 5:4
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