This is the main page for David Odden's project on Logoori, one of the Luhya languages of Western Kenya. My project is part of a wider research effort on Luhya languages currently under way in collaboration with Michael Marlo and Michael Diercks. This work has been financially supported in part by NSF grant BCS-1355750 to Michael Marlo at U. Missouri. My own web page is here.
The main components of the project are a grammatical description, collection of texts, and a lexicon. My academic publications on Logoori are available on my web page, but also linked below. In order to understand the spelling system used in data presented here, non-linguists may want read this paper, 'Writing the Logoori language'. In writing about Logoori grammatical, it is necessary to suppliment and modify typical spelling in order to explain how words are pronounced. Speakers of Logoori implicitly know some very complex rules regarding vowel quality, length, tone and many other things, but generally do not know that their language uses tone and other such features. In this "writing" paper, I present the main aspects of the writing system that are used in this work, along with sample recordings so that you can listen to in order to better understand what I mean by "tone", "vowel length" and so on.
This section contains the (current draft of) the Logori grammar, which aims to explain the rule system of Logoori. This is a description of principles of word-formation and pronunciation, and is not a theoretical analysis as you would find in my academic publications. Also included are some basical grammatical tables, such as verbal tone-paradigms which show how tone differences play an important role in grammar – the tables includes recordings, so that you can relate the phonetic spellings to pronunciation.
This section is a collection of texts and songs, in the form of recordings, conventional Logoori spellings, and corresponding English versions, gathered from a number of speakers from northern evoRogoori.
This section is a basic dictionary of Logoori words, including numerous recordings of pronunciations.
I have published three papers in the area of linguistic theory which center around the phonology of Logoori.
Tonal Melodies in the Logoori Verb, in Brentari & Lee eds. Shaping phonology