Chapter 31Personal-Affix Junctural Sandhi, =an/a= Allomorphy, and Connected-Speech Reduction

31.1 Overview

The person markers of Hokkaido Ainu undergo systematic phonological changes at their juncture with a following verb or noun stem. The most salient is the deletion of the vowel of ku= and ci= before stem-initial vowels other than /i/, a feature of the southern varieties (Saru, Chitose, Mukawa). This deletion interacts with the prosodic-word formation and accent rules treated in Chapter 26 (Accent in Compounds and under Affixation and Cliticization) and with the vowel-weakening mechanism described in Chapter 29 (Glide Epenthesis and Vowel-Hiatus Resolution). The general sandhi processes that operate across all morpheme junctures — coda-/r/ assimilation, nasal-place assimilation — are the subject of Chapter 28 (Assimilation and Cluster Simplification: Coda /r/, Nasals, and Clusters); the person-marker inventory and its morphosyntactic analysis are laid out in Chapter 62 (Architecture of the Personal-Affix System: The Four Persons and the S/A/O Paradigms). Nakagawa (2024: §2)

31.2 The ku= and ci= vowel-deletion rule

In Saru, Chitose, and Mukawa, the /u/ of ku= (first-person singular agent/subject) deletes before a stem-initial /a/, /e/, /u/, or /o/; correspondingly, the /i/ of ci= (first-person plural exclusive agent/subject) deletes in the same environments Nakagawa (2024: 33, 52); Satō (2008: xii). The vowel /i/ is excluded from the deletion domain: before a stem beginning with /i/, a distinct vowel-weakening process applies (§3 below). Outside the southern zone, most Hokkaido dialects preserve the full marker forms without deletion Nakagawa (2024: 52); Nakagawa & Fukazawa (2022: §3).

The two deletion rules can be stated as: Nakagawa (2024: §1.4.5)

• /u/ → ∅ / ku= __ {a, e, u, o}…
• /i/ → ∅ / ci= __ {a, e, u, o}…

Learners of Saru and Chitose frequently overgeneralize the deletion to /i/-initial stems, producing ungrammatical *k=ipe; the restriction to {a, e, u, o} is the corrective aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, 2024-11-28) ‹corpus-confirmed›.

31.3 The /i/-initial block and vowel weakening

When the stem begins with /i/, deletion of ku='s /u/ is blocked; the stem-initial /i/ instead undergoes 母音弱化 (vowel weakening), becoming the glide [j]: ku=ipe → ku=ype /kuˈype/, while *k=ipe is ungrammatical Nakagawa (2024: 52); Satō (2008: xii). The same process operates with e=: e=itak → eytak [ejˈtak] 'your words / you speak' Nakagawa (2024: 40). The weakening process (/i/ → [j] after a vowel-final prefix) is described in broader scope in Chapter 29 (Glide Epenthesis and Vowel-Hiatus Resolution).

A second environment blocks weakening: when the stem's first syllable is closed (CVC), the result of weakening would produce an illicit consonant cluster. The stem ikra has σ1 = ik (coda /k/); weakening would yield the onset sequence /k-jk-/, which violates the (C)V(C) syllable canon (Chapter 21 (Syllable Structure, Phonotactics, and Word-Edge Constraints)). Accordingly ku=ikra is the only licit form: neither *ku=ykra nor *k=ikra arises Nakagawa (2024: 53); aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, 2024-11-28) ‹corpus-confirmed›. By contrast, stems with an open /i/-initial syllable do undergo weakening: eytasa (< e= + itasa) and eywanke (< e= + iwanke) both show the [j] glide aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, 2024-11-28) ‹corpus-confirmed›.

31.4 Prosodic integration and rule ordering

The markers ku=, e=, and ci= form a single prosodic word with the following stem, so that the pitch-accent placement rules (原則1 / 原則2; Chapter 23 (The Pitch-Accent Placement Rule and the Accented/Accentless Dialect Split)) are reapplied to the whole unit. The crucial ordering point is that the accent shift occurs before vowel deletion: the surface accent is computed from the prefixed word, not re-derived from the contracted form Nakagawa (2024: 52); Shiraishi (2022: §5.1).

The derivation of k=ómare illustrates the two-step ordering: Nakagawa (2024: §1.4.5)

The same ordering holds with ci=: etú → ci=étu (accent on σ2 of the new unit) → c=étu [ˈcetu] Nakagawa (2024: 52). For consonant-initial stems, deletion does not apply; only the accent shift operates: hopúni → ku=hópuni 'I rise' Nakagawa (2024: 52).

The markers a= (fourth-person agent/subject) and eci= (second-person plural agent/subject) behave differently: they do not form a single prosodic word with the stem, so the stem retains its underlying accent without shift. Thus omáre → a=omáre (accent unchanged) Nakagawa (2024: 53); Shiraishi (2022: §5.1).

31.5 Juncture tightness and the =an boundary

Within the person-marker class as a whole, the degree of phonological integration with the host stem varies beyond the binary inner/outer accent-class split. Community phonetic observation — uncorroborated by instrumental study in the sources read for this grammar — reports that the marker group binds more tightly to its host than a compound constituent does: a=kor itak 'speech one has' surfaces as [akorəʔitak], with a glottal catch at the word boundary after kor, rather than resyllabifying the coda /r/ across the compound juncture to *[ako.ri.tak] aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, 2024-03-18) ‹speculative›. Within the marker paradigm, the inner-class markers (ku=, e=) are reported to be phonetically tighter than the outer-class markers (a=, =an), the latter tending to be realized more independently in measured speech aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, 2024-03-18) ‹speculative›.

The suffix =an (fourth-person S) shows a juncture pattern distinct from that of derivational suffixes: after a consonant-final stem, the coda does not resyllabify onto the following /a/ by the regular resyllabification rule of Chapter 21 (Syllable Structure, Phonotactics, and Word-Edge Constraints). Instead the boundary is marked by a glottal stop or tense onset: sap=an → [sapʔan], not *[sa.pan] aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, 2023-12-27) ‹speculative›. This contrasts with the morpheme-internal resyllabification seen in true derivational junctures such as sik-o → [si.ko] Nakagawa (2024: 38–39); Shiraishi (2022: §4.4). The =an suffix also carries a secondary accent when the verb stem closes with a CV(+) syllable: iˈruska-ˌan 'one is angry' retains both accents. This secondary accent disappears when the stem ends in a CVC syllable: ˈcis-an 'one cries', ˈsap-an Shiraishi (2022: §5.1).

31.6 Connected-speech reductions

In fast or casual speech, the vowel-deletion process extends to sequences that have become partially lexicalized. The independent pronoun kuani 'I' (analysed in Chapter 49 (Personal, Reflexive, and Emphatic Pronouns)) reduces to kani by the same /u/-deletion that yields ciep → cep 'food (eaten thing)' aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (gengojiro, 2024-02-05) ‹corpus-suggested›. Both kani and cep are the standard Saru/Chitose dictionary entries, showing that these contractions have become conventionalized rather than remaining casual variants.

The romanized orthography writes underlying (etymological) forms throughout — ku=omare rather than k=omare; ran wa rather than ram ma — while katakana practice tends to follow the phonetic output more closely Nakagawa (2024: 37–38); aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, 2024-07-09) ‹corpus-confirmed›. The sandhi forms are produced in speech but not written in standard transcription, so corpus searches for assimilated person-marker forms typically return nothing; the spoken distribution of the rule is consequently under-documented in the written record Nakagawa (2024: 37–38). The wider romanization policy and its divergence from katakana practice are discussed in Chapter 15 (Orthographic Standardization and the Word-Division Problem).

The coda /r/ of a verb stem can interact with person-marker sandhi when a /r/-final stem precedes a vowel-initial marker or suffix. The regressive assimilation rules of Chapter 28 (Assimilation and Cluster Simplification: Coda /r/, Nasals, and Clusters) operate on the coda /r/ first and produce the form that then serves as input to person-marker juncture rules. The fast-speech deletion of word-final /r/ itself (kur → ku, kor → ko) is treated in Chapter 19 (The Rhotic /r/ and Coda-r).

31.7 The clitic–affix cline

Nakagawa's standard romanization applies the equals sign to all person markers at the left or right edge of the verb: ku=, e=, a=, ci=, eci=, en=, un=, =an, and =as Nakagawa (2024: 33). The = is an orthographic device — Nakagawa states expressly that it is unrelated to the linguistic convention of marking clitics with an equals sign Nakagawa (2024: 58–60) — so the notation itself carries no claim about clitic as against affix status. The orthographic policy is discussed in Chapter 15 (Orthographic Standardization and the Word-Division Problem).

The phonological evidence surveyed in this chapter shows that the personal markers — written uniformly with = — occupy different positions along the clitic-to-affix cline. Three independent diagnostics converge on the same two-way split:

• Accent shift: the inner class (ku=, e=, ci=) triggers prosodic-word formation and reapplication of accent rules; the outer class (a=, eci=) does not (§4 above; (Nakagawa 2024: 52–53); (Shiraishi 2022: §5.1)).
• Vowel deletion: only ku= and ci= lose their vowels before non-/i/ stems in the southern dialects, marking them as the most tightly bonded members of the marker paradigm (§2 above; (Nakagawa 2024: 52)).
• Juncture opacity: the =an boundary blocks the resyllabification that is otherwise permitted at morpheme-internal junctures, placing it above the level of a derivational suffix in phonological independence (§5 above; aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) nukopoli, 2023-12-27, ‹speculative›).

The three criteria jointly define a gradient: inner clitics > outer clitics > independent words, with ku= and ci= the most tightly integrated members and =an the loosest. A parallel gradation in morphophonological tightness across person-marking sub-classes has been documented for Sakhalin Ainu (Sakaguchi 2024), providing a comparative point for the Hokkaido two-way split. The morphosyntactic diagnostics for the Hokkaido system are taken up in Chapter 62 (Architecture of the Personal-Affix System: The Four Persons and the S/A/O Paradigms) and the template position of each marker in Chapter 69 (The Personal-Affix Template: Position Classes and Affix Ordering).