Syllable structure and phonotactics of SiWU
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates the syllable structure of Siwu and its language-specific rules on syllabification in an attempt to contribute to efforts to document minority languages. In a multilingual setting dominated by a few major languages like Ghana, it is expected that languages spoken by minority groups will face endangerment if their data is not preserved through research. Siwu and other Ghana-Togo Mountain languages are such a group of languages in a subregion dominated by a major lingua franca, Ewe. This study begins with a review of existing works on the Siwu syllable as well as a study of available literature on four other GTM languages in order to determine the scope of the study and to enable a comparative study of these languages. The main focus of the study involves using data from the FCBH Global Bible (2008) to identify all possible syllable types that constitute Siwu’s inventory, examine the sub-constituents of the Siwu syllable, and analyse permissible and non-permissible sequences in Siwu complex onsets. One of my findings is that although some closed syllables are in the language, the majority of Siwu’s syllables are without the coda. Syllables with codas are mostly restricted to ideophones or loan/coined words. Regarding clusters, I find that there is an unequal preference for one of the two segments that occupy the C2 position of Siwu clusters. [r] is more freely distributed than [l]. I provide an analysis of restrictions on onset clusters that makes reference to both sonority and place features within the framework of feature geometry. The comparative study of syllable structure in Siwu and four other GTM languages also reveals that GTM languages have more similarities than differences in their syllable constitution. This study is significant because it is the first to provide a detailed description and analysis of the Siwu syllable.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".