Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 103. kötet (2006)

Tanulmányok - Tamás Ildikó: The Lule Saami vocalism 7

In the fourth syllable: - a, á (only as an allophone of a or e), e and i, о (but not in (_#) position). 2. The syllable of Lule Saami For considerations of space, I do not intend to dwell on the rules of syllable structure; I just introduce the essential amount of information that is indespensable for further analyses. In Lule Saami vowel sequences do not exist, the first nucleus (N) - that can be either a long or short monophthong, or any kind of diphthong - is followed by either the coda (Co) or the onset (O) of the following syllable. (With the exception of some recent loan words, e.g.: káfea (ká-fe-a) in which hiatus remains.) Fig. 2. The syllable structure of Lule Saami: initial syllables CV tier Segmental tier In the syllable tree the presence of the domains left of the first broken line and right of the second is not obligatory, generally either О or Co appears in a syllable, or both of them can appear at the same time as well. However, the onset is an obligatory element of the syllables after the first one. Therefore, the structure of the second and following syllables is as follows: 11 In this case VV refers only to diphthongs, while V indicates both short and long monophthongs together, because in this figure there is no need for a quantitative distinction of the latter.