Long vowels in shiNgazidja

ShiNgazidja has a phonetic quirk: it preserves long vowels, i.e. vocalic sounds twice as long as the matching short vowel. They're written by doubling:

• soo (path, Ng) — pronounced /so:/ with a held o
• nvuu (strength, Ng) — pronounced /vu:/ with a held u

In other dialects, these long vowels have contracted to short vowels or been replaced by other words.

Unlike the previous rules (dr/tr, dz/z, pv/v, hu/u), preserving long vowels is not a systematic rule you can mechanically apply to any word.

It's an archaism preserved in certain words of the old Bantu stock. The other dialects have reduced these long vowels to plain ones through gradual phonetic erosion.

In practice:

• If you read a text with doubled vowels, it's very likely shiNgazidja
• If you write in shimaoré, never double vowels — almost always a mistake
• To convert a Ng text to a Ma one, simplifying long vowels to short is a good first reflex, but not mechanical: you need to know the equivalent word in the eastern bloc

Last lesson of the module: a recap of the semantic pairs and triplets to memorise as concepts rather than isolated words. nyumba / ɗago / ɗaho, mndru / muntru / mutru, etc.