Plains Cree Texts. New York: AMS Press, 1974 (reprinted). Denny, Peter J. 1978. "The Semantic Roles of Medials within Algonquian Verbs".
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Initials are initial consonants, while finals are all possible combinations of medials (semivowels coming before the vowel), a nucleus vowel and coda (final vowel or consonant).
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His system is a significant simplification of the Karlgren–Li reconstruction of Middle Chinese, but retains a similar structure, especially in the treatment of medials and vowels.
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40 The only required component of a clause in Blackfoot is the verb, referred to as a verbal complex in the Algonquian literature, that must be appropriately inflected according to the standard template: > preverb – root – medial – final Preverbs are prefixes which encode adverbs, most pronouns, locatives, manners, aspect, mood, and tense. Medials are suffixes which primarily encode manner and incorporated objects. Finals are suffixes which encode transitivity, animacy, and valency. Roots and finals are always required in a verbal complex whereas preverb and medials are not.
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The consonants are arranged into six consonant groups (called based on articulation, like other Brahmi scripts. Tone markings and vowel modifications are written as diacritics placed to the left, right, top, and bottom of letters. Orthographic changes postceded shifts in phonology (such as the merging of the and medials) rather than transformations in Burmese grammatical structure and phonology, which by contrast, has remained stable between Old Burmese and modern Burmese. For example, during the Pagan era, the medial was transcribed in writing, which has been replaced by medials and in modern Burmese (e.g.
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The medials have become aspirate tenues with a low intonation, which also marks the words having a simple initial consonant; while the former aspirates and the complex initials simplified in speech are uttered with a high tone, shrill and rapidly.
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Most linguists agree that division-III finals contained a medial and that division-I finals had no such medial, but further details vary between reconstructions. To account for the many rhyme classes distinguished by the Qieyun, Karlgren proposed 16 vowels and 4 medials. Later scholars have proposed numerous variations.
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Medial stems may not appear as the initial or sole stem in a word, and therefore must be combined with an initial. Medials, such as -atol, always begin with a vowel. Medial stems may also occur as the second member of a compound with a special initial l-. This compound has essentially the same meaning as the medial itself.
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Most Lower Yangtze varieties retain a initial, but in central Jiangsu (including Yangzhou) it has merged with . Tai–Ru varieties retain a distinct initial, but this has merged with the zero initial in other Mandarin varieties. Nanjing Mandarin is an exception to the normal occurrence of the , and medials in Mandarin, along with eastern Shanxi and some Southwest Mandarin dialects.
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Whereas Modern Standard Burmese uses 3 written medials (, , and ), Old Burmese had a fourth written medial , which was typically written as a stacked consonant underneath the letter being modified. Old Burmese orthography treated the preaspirated consonant as a separate segment, since a special diacritic (ha hto, ) had not yet been innovated. As such, the letter ha () was stacked above the consonant being modified (e.g. where Modern Burmese uses ).
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Rhyming syllables in the Qieyun are assumed to have the same nuclear vowel and coda, but often have different medials. Middle Chinese reconstructions by different modern linguists vary. These differences are minor and fairly uncontroversial in terms of consonants; however, there is a more significant difference as to the vowels. The most widely used transcriptions are Li Fang-Kuei's modification of Karlgren's reconstruction and William Baxter's typeable notation.
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Ottawa has complex systems of both inflectional and derivational morphology. Like other dialects of Ojibwe, Ottawa employs complex combinations of inflectional prefixes and suffixes to indicate grammatical information. Ojibwe word stems are formed with combinations of word roots (sometimes also called initials), and affixes referred to as medials and finals to create basic words to which inflectional prefixes and suffixes are added. Word stems are also combined with other word stems to create compound words.
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In many Wu dialects, vowels and final glides have monophthongized, producing a rich inventory of vowels in open syllables. Reduction of medials is common in Yue dialects. The Middle Chinese codas, consisting of glides and , nasals , and , and stops , and , are best preserved in southern dialects, particularly Yue dialects such as Cantonese. In Jin, Lower Yangtze Mandarin and Wu dialects, the stops have merged as a final glottal stop, while in most northern varieties they have disappeared.
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In Cantonese, the simple vowels i u iu o a e are , apart from and after velars, which open to diphthongs, as in ci and ciu . Diphthongs may vary markedly depending on initial and medial, as in cau , ceau , ciau , though both ceu ~ cieu are , following the general pattern of before a coda (cf. cen vs can ). Cantonese does not have medials, apart from gw, kw, though sometimes it is the nuclear vowel which drops: giung , xiong , but giuan .
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Chinese finals may be analysed as an optional medial glide, a main vowel and an optional coda. Conservative vowel systems, such as those of Gan dialects, have high vowels , and , which also function as medials, mid vowels and , and a low -like vowel. In other dialects, including Mandarin dialects, has merged with , leaving a single mid vowel with a wide range of allophones. Many dialects, particularly in northern and central China, have apical or retroflex vowels, which are syllabic fricatives derived from high vowels following sibilant initials.
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In many dialects of Mandarin Chinese, the alveolar sibilants and the velars were palatalized before the medials and merged in pronunciation, yielding the alveolo-palatal sibilants . Alveolo-palatal consonants occur in modern Standard Chinese and are written as in Pinyin. Postal romanization does not show palatalized consonants, reflecting the dialect of the imperial court during the Qing dynasty. For instance, the name of the capital of China was formerly spelled Peking, but is now spelled ' , and Tientsin and Sian were the former spellings of ' and ' .
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Traditional Chinese syllable structure In Chinese syllable structure, the onset is replaced with an initial, and a semivowel or liquid forms another segment, called the medial. These four segments are grouped into two slightly different components: ; Initial (ι): optional onset, excluding sonorants ; Final (φ): medial, nucleus, and final consonantMore generally, the letter φ indicates a prosodic foot of two syllables :; Medial (μ): optional semivowel or liquidMore generally, the letter μ indicates a mora :; Nucleus (ν): a vowel or syllabic consonant :; Coda (κ): optional final consonant In many languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, such as Chinese, the syllable structure is expanded to include an additional, optional segment known as a medial, which is located between the onset (often termed the initial in this context) and the rime. The medial is normally a semivowel, but reconstructions of Old Chinese generally include liquid medials ( in modern reconstructions, in older versions), and many reconstructions of Middle Chinese include a medial contrast between and , where the functions phonologically as a glide rather than as part of the nucleus. In addition, many reconstructions of both Old and Middle Chinese include complex medials such as , , and .
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Taiwanese kana (タイ15px ヲァヌ15px ギイ15px カア15px ビェン15px) is a katakana-based writing system once used to write Holo Taiwanese, when Taiwan was under Japanese control. It functioned as a phonetic guide for Chinese characters, much like furigana in Japanese or Zhùyīn fúhào in Chinese. There were similar systems for other languages in Taiwan as well, including Hakka and Formosan languages. Unlike Japanese or Ainu, Taiwanese kana are used similarly to the Zhùyīn fúhào characters, with kana serving as initials, vowel medials and consonant finals, marked with tonal marks.
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There is much less agreement regarding the medials and vowels. It is generally agreed that "closed" finals had a rounded glide or vowel , and that the vowels in "outer" finals were more open than those in "inner" finals. The interpretation of the "divisions" is more controversial. Three classes of Qieyun finals occur exclusively in the first, second or fourth rows of the rime tables, respectively, and have thus been labelled finals of divisions I, II and IV. The remaining finals are labelled division-III finals because they occur in the third row, but they may also occur in the second or fourth rows for some initials.
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Initial consonants and "medials" are alphabetic, but the nucleus and coda are combined as in syllabaries. That is, a syllable like kan is written k-an, and kwan is written k-u-an; the vowel is not written distinct from a final consonant. Pahawh Hmong is somewhat similar, but the rime is written before the initial; there are two letters for each rime, depending on which tone diacritic is used; and the rime /āu/ and the initial /k/ are not written except in disambiguation. Old Persian cuneiform was somewhat similar to the Tartessian script, in that some consonant letters were unique to a particular vowel, some were partially conflated, and some simple consonants, but all vowels were written regardless of whether or not they were redundant.
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