ABSTRACT
The following are the changes that take place when a consonant occurs between two vowels.
a) a voiceless stem-initial consonant becomes voiced (this applies to t, f, s and to p in Ahanta). e.g. pia 'to push' mibialzl
'I pushed' (Ahanta only)
'bottles' 'I understand' 'he cried'
funli 'corpse' avunli 'corpses' b) plosives and affricates become continuant: i) the voiceless velar plosive /k/ and the voiceless affricates become
fricative. e.g. b
'go' 'dog' 'hat'
'he went' 'dogs' 'hats'
ii) the voiced alveolar plosive /d/ becomes lateral and the voiced bilabial plosive /b/ becomes /y/ or /w/ e.g. duma 'name' 31uma
ba 'come' yeya/yawa bvzvlz 'fetish' awvzvlz
Grammatical contexts for consonant mutation
'names'
'we've come'
'fetishes'
As stated above consonant mutation mayor may nor take place between two vowels depending on the grammatical context. The following are the grammatical contexts in which consonant mutation may take place:
I The past tense suffix /-ll/ always has an unadvanced vowel /1/, whether the vowel of the verb stem is unadvanced or advanced.
