Sounds
Nobiin has open and closed syllables: ág ‘mouth’, één ‘woman’, gíí ‘uncle’, kám ‘camel’, díís ‘blood’. Every syllable bears a tone. Long consonants are only found in intervocalic position, whereas long vowels can occur in initial, medial and final position. Phonotactically, there might be a weak relationship between the occurrence of consonant and vowel length: forms like dàrrìl 'climb' and dààrìl 'be present' are found, but *dàrìl (short V + short C) and *dààrrìl (long V + long C) do not exist; similarly, féyyìr 'grow' and fééyìr 'lose (a battle)' occur, but not *féyìr and *fééyyìr.
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Famous quotes containing the word sounds:
“She sang a song that sounds like life; I mean it was sad. Délira knew no other types of songs. She didn’t sing loud, and the song had no words. It was sung with closed lips and it stayed down in one’s throat.... Life is what taught them, these Negresses, to sing as if they were choking back sobs. It is a song that always ends with a beginning anew because this song is the picture of misery, and tell me, does misery ever end?”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)
“I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,—those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The comedy of hollow sounds derives
From truth and not from satire on our lives.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)