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This may be a dumb question but what do letters in brackets mean? I was reading an article about the West Bomberai languages when i came across: I saw something like:

*[a/o]n
*k[a/o]

I saw this everywhere including the proto-language of the language family.

am[i/u]n
k[i/u]m[i/u]
[ja]ŋgal

Also including the 'V' inside words, such as

tVmber

I also saw one in the Proto-Trans-New-Guinea:

*kobutu, *kv(mb,p)utu, *mUtUna; *mVtVna

I get so confused when i see it. Also, what does the C mean? I saw something like:

kat(i/e)C

Rydex
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3 Answers3

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As user6726 says, there is no fixed meaning for these.

The expressions with a slash almost certainly indicate alternatives, but you would have to read the text to find out what kind of alternatives. For a recorded language they might be in free variation, or different dialects, or conditioned variants (eg in a language like Turkish with vowel harmony, most suffixes exists in two or four variations, where the vowel depends on what prcedes the suffix). For a proto-language, there are more possibilities: it may be that the precise sound is not securely known - different descendents may imply different vowels, in which case it may be a matter of dialects of the proto-language.

The capital letters such as V and C generally denote classes of sounds. For example, V is probably "any vowel". U will indicate a class of sounds, but you will need to look for an explanation of what class (since in most orthographies 'U' represents a high, back, rounded vowel, the class will probably have at least one of those features, but there's no general rule to tell you which of them).

Colin Fine
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  • So basically, if a language has an a, e, i, o, u, æ and œ, it could mean it can be any vowel e.g kVan so kaan, kean, kian, koan, kuan, kæan and kœan? – Rydex Jun 08 '22 at 16:25
  • Also what does the C mean? I saw something like kat(i/e)C – Rydex Jun 08 '22 at 16:28
  • Wouldn't C usually mean "some unspecified consonant"? – Vegawatcher Jun 08 '22 at 16:33
  • @Vegawatcher not sure, i am a beginner in linguistic syntax. – Rydex Jun 08 '22 at 16:34
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    Just as Colin Fine said that "V" generally indicates "any vowel," "C" generally indicates "any consonant." If I saw "kat(i/e)C," depending on context, I would assume that "C" means any consonant and "(i/e" means "either 'i' or 'e,' but no other sound." – Vegawatcher Jun 08 '22 at 16:42
  • Finnish also has a vowel harmony. For one class of verbs, the conjugation is listet as follows: -n, -t, -V, -mme, -tte, -vat/vät Here the -V means to double the last vowel. i.e. asua (to live) has the stem asu-, so the conjugations would be asun, asut, asuu, asumme, asutte, asuvat (vat not vät, because of the vowel harmony). – infinitezero Jun 09 '22 at 06:14
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The general answer is that they don't have a fixed meaning, and one would hope that the author would explain the notation. When the items are phonetic letters, it conventionally means "phonetically", for example [tɪŋ] means "phonetically, "tɪŋ" as opposed to "phonemically" or "underlyingly" which would be /tɪŋ/. In such usage, it may indicate that a particular segment is phonetically extant or present in a word, but is not necessarily contrastively there. A notation like "[ɔ/u]" probably means either that there is variation between two phonetic values, alternatively there is uncertainty.

It might be a device for setting off morphosemantic features, for example "eat[PAST]", but you could decide against that since P, A, S, T are generally not transcriptional letters (however, never assume that transcriptions always conform to IPA standards).

user6726
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3

In reconstructions of proto-languages, V can also stand for "we know there was a vowel here but we're not sure what vowel it was". Similarly, the slash alternatives can mean "we know there was either an *a or an *o here but we're not sure which". (Or capital letters more generally, e.g. *H for an unknown laryngeal in Proto-Indo-European studies.)

For vowels specifically, capital I, U, E, O are sometimes used for ɪ, ʊ, ɛ, ɔ when the author has difficulty typing the IPA sounds (e.g. on a typewriter back in the pre-computer-typesetting days).

But all of these details should be explained by the author. Without context, there's no way to know if they mean "we're not sure which alternative was used" or "it could be realized as either of these depending on vowel harmony", as Colin Fine explained, or any other interpretation.

Draconis
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