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    There is also a flapped nasalised l (or flapped n), written ɽ̃ here.

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*It is written rnasalised vowel (i.e. rvowaln in existing orthography).

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*    r is trilled between vowels; fricative at the beginning of a word.

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*    rh is a voiceless fricative or voiceless trilled r.

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*    n is post-alveolar.

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*    ny palatal, seems to occur as a variant.

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*    nw a velar nasal with lip-rounding, seems to occur an a variant; the

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*velar nasal ŋ is found in onomatopoeic words only.

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*    ny has been written yvoweln, and nw, wvoweln, following

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*Yoruba tradition. More recently, ny and nw have been adopted, but

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*without omission of the final n.

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*    x and ɣ are respectively the voiceless and the voiced velar fricatives.

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*In publications they have been written kh and gh.

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*    kp and gb are labio-velars, i.e. sounds requiring a double closure―that

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*of the lips and of the back of the tongue against the soft palate, with

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*a simultaneous release of these stops. Dr I. C. Ward, who examined

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*the pronunciation of a Bini (J. E. Edegbe), and the author were of the

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*opinion that these sounds gave no impression of being implosive, but

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*had no experimental means of verifying this point.

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*    w is a semi-vowel.

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*    y is a voiced palatal fricative.

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*    (Palatal and velar semi-vowels are often used in diphthongs and

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*triphthongs, see above.)

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*    h needs no comment.

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*    LENGTH, STRESS AND TONES

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*    Length is very rarely indicated in this dictionary; it is marked only

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*in the case of vowels, where it is shown by doubling the vowel symbol.

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*There are many pairs of verbs differentiated by a combination of vowel-

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*length and intonation, one type having a shorter vowel and a high

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*tone in the imperfect form, the other, a longer vowel and a rising tone,

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*e.g. ma [ ˥ ] “to fit”, ma [ / ] “to be good”. In these cases the difference

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*in length has not been indicated wherever the distinction is made clear

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*by the tone marks. In an orthography for Bini speakers in which tone-

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*marks are not used, it may be advisable to mark the difference in length

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*instead.

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*    Stress has not been indicated (but v. below).

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*    TONES AND TONE MARKING

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*    The following tones are found in Bini: high, low, mid, rising and

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*falling, rising-falling and falling-rising. The system adopted here for

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*marking the intonation of Bini words and sentences, which has been

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*used by Dr I. C. Ward in her study of intonation, makes use of five

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*xii

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