Palatal and labial-velar consonants

The vowels /i/ and /u/ become the corresponding semi-vowels, /j/ and /w/, when they occupy a consonant position in the syllabic structure of lexical items. They occupy a position immediately preceding the vowel. Their presence in the onset, when preceded by velar and labial stops respectively, can produce phonetically palatal and labial-velar consonants whose role in the phonology of JamC has been the subject of some disagreement.

Cassidy and Le Page (1980: xxxix) treat [c] and [Ɉ] as palatal consonant phonemes. By contrast, Devonish and Seiler (1991) treat them as consonant plus semi-vowel sequences, i.e. as combinations of /k/ or /g/ and /j/. We opt for the latter analysis. Were they underlyingly palatal stops, one would expect that they would also occur in the coda, as do all the other oral stop consonants. The consonant and semi-vowel is consistent with what we have noted about the structure of the onset, i.e. that the semi-vowel must immediately precede the vowel. Below are minimal pairs or near minimal pairs demonstrating the contrast between /kj/ and /gj/ on one hand, and /k/ and /g/ on the other.

Like the phonetic palatals, the labialized velars, [p^W] and [b^W], do not occur in syllable-final position and seem best dealt with as onset clusters consisting of stop consonant, /p/ or /b/, followed by the semi-vowel, /w/. The distribution is more restricted than the phonetic palatal stops, with [p^W] and [b^W] only normally occurring before the diphthong /ai/. Below are some minimal pairs illustrating the contrast between /pw/ and /bw/ on one hand, and /p/ and /b/ on the other.