- « Fanagalo and the Bantu Languages in South Africa, » African Studies 12.1–9 (1953). Page 8 cited, italics mine.
- For a general discussion of Sango and bibliography see W. Samarin, «Sango, au African Lingua Franca,» Word 11.254–267 (1955).
- The vocabulary shall eventually be treated in another article. All translations of Sango words are here meant to be only glosses.
- I have been recently informed by a certain European resident of Bossangoa that Kêrux is the nom de plume of a Catholic priest, the Rev. Father Elzear.
- Each published scientific or pseudo-scientific work on Sango has utilized a different orthography. Kêrux's orthography is perhaps the worst because of its inconsistent use of diacritical marks. Tisserant's is the best, for it is is the most consistent and the least biased toward the French. The orthography used by the Protestant missions and in which the Scriptures are being published is, curiously enough, the most Gallic or them all. The Roman Catholic literature seems to follow Tisserant. Needless to say, none of them is wholly phonemic, neither scientifically nor practically. Tisserant indicates no tones and Kêrux and the Protestants only sporadically. In this article words used in the orthography of other writers are preceded by an asterisk.
- For the sake of convenience this phonetically complex phoneme is henceforth written /mgb/.
- A word is phonologically defined as a minimal morphemic segment characterized by prevocalic glottal stop and by the absence of consonant clusters (other than the prenasalized stops and fricatives which are here analyzed as unit phonemes). A syllable is defined as any vowel, preceded or not by a consonant, simultaneously articulated with one of the tonemes.
- The infrequency of nasalized vowels seems rather strange in view of the fact that most of the languages of the west are characterized by having nasalized vowels.
- One interesting feature of Sango is the common occurrence of non-contiguous identical vowels in polysyllabic words. Out of a random selection of 222 words with the pattern CVCV 158 had identical vowels. E.g. kété ‘small,’ gbogbo ‘mat,’ gásà ‘goat.’
- See K. L. Pike, Tone Languages (Ann Arbor: Michigan Press, 1948) for discussion of the use of controlled contexts in the analysis of tones.
- It is worth noting that there are some men, trained in the religious schools but hardly at all acquainted with French, who affect the use of the French central vowel of de and le when reading the Scriptures in Sango. Also, one Gbeya man, more or less familiar with French, used the uvular trill instead of the apical flap as he read ktrl ‘to return.’ It is yet too soon to say how such intrusions will affect Sango's phonemic structure.
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