Venda language

The Venda language uses the Latin alphabet with five additional accented letters. There are four dental consonants with a circumflex accent below the letter (ḓ, ḽ, ṋ, ṱ) and an overdot for velar ṅ. Five vowel letters are used to write seven vowels. The letters C, J and Q are used only for foreign words and names. Unicode The extra letters have the following Unicode names: • Ḓ U+1E12 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW • ḓ U+1E13 LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW • Ḽ U+1E3C LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW • ḽ U+1E3D LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW • Ṅ U+1E44 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N WITH DOT ABOVE • ṅ U+1E45 LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH DOT ABOVE • Ṋ U+1E4A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW • ṋ U+1E4B LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW • Ṱ U+1E70 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW • ṱ U+1E71 LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH CIRCUMFLEX BELOW Luṱhofunḓeraru lwa Mibvumo The sintu writing system Isibheqe Sohlamvu/Ditema tsa Dinoko, known technically in Venda as Luṱhofunḓeraru lwa Mibvumo, is also used for the Venda language. ==Phonology==

Venda distinguishes dental ṱ, ṱh, ḓ, ṋ, ḽ from alveolar t, th, d, n, l as well as (like in Ewe) labiodental f, v from bilabial fh, vh (the last two are slightly rounded). There are no clicks. As in other South African languages like Zulu, ph, ṱh, th, kh are aspirated and the "plain" stops p, ṱ, t, and k are ejective. Vowels There are five vowel sounds in Tshivenḓa. Consonants A labiodental nasal sound appears in prenasalised consonant sounds. is mostly heard as an allophone of in free variation and in loanwords. Labiovelar sounds occur as alternatives to labiopalatal sounds and may also be pronounced . Fortition of occurs after nasal prefixes, likely to . Tones Venda has a specified tone, , with unmarked syllables having a low tone. Phonetic falling tone occurs only in sequences of more than one vowel or on the penultimate syllable if the vowel is long. Tone patterns exist independently of the consonants and vowels of a word and so they are word tones. Venda tone also follows Meeussen's rule: when a word beginning with a high tone is preceded by that high tone, the initial high tone is lost. (That is, there cannot be two adjacent marked high tones in a word, but high tone spreads allophonically to a following non-tonic ("low"-tone) syllable.) There are only a few tone patterns in Venda words (no tone, a single high tone on some syllable, two non-adjacent high tones), which behave as follows: == References ==