Tembo is a Bantu language spoken by some 50, 000 peole in part of Kivu Region of the Republic of Zaïre. It is one of the languages in Zaïre which have not yet been described on the part of the linguist.
This paper, the data of which is based on field work carried out by the auther in 1976-1977, treats tonal phenomena of nouns which, as far as the auther knows, characterize Tembo as a crucially distinct type of tone language among the Bantu languages hitherto studied,
In most languages of this family, it is usual to find that tone of noun class prefixes is constant, either high as in Luba and a few others for example, or low as in most others including Proto-Bantu. In any case the prefixes in these languages have lexical tone of their own.
In Tembo, however, there are two kinds of noun prefixes with regard to the lexical representation of their tone: prefixes which have high tone lexically (tuba type), and prefixes which are deprived of tone in their underlying representation. In the latter type the tone of the prefixes shows up as high or low according to individual noun stems, because it is the stem which prescribes the tone of the prefix—the tone of the prefix being part of the stem. So all the nouns derived from a particular noun stem have the same tonal pattern regardless of the noun class in which they are classified.
The noun class prefixes in Tembo are, for the most part, of the latter type with the former type being restricted to only a few prefixes. The notion of
stem-tone is, then, presented in order to describe the process in which the toneless prefixes are inserted into noun stems to form nouns.
Finally in relation to this problem of the lexical representation of tone, tonal changes of nouns in a syntactic construction (N+Adj) and their formulation are dealt with.
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