Pitch, vowel duration, and phonation in Baima and neighboring languages (original) (raw)

The Historical Phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese

2019

The discovery of sound laws by comparing attested languages is the method which has unlocked the history of European languages stretching back thousands of years before the appearance of written records, e.g. Latin p- corresponds to English f- (pes, foot; primus, first; plenus, full). Although Burmese, Chinese, and Tibetan have long been regarded as related, the systematic exploration of their shared history has never before been attempted. Tracing the history of these three languages using just such sound laws, this book sheds light on the prehistoric language from which they descend. Written for readers with little linguistic knowledge of these languages, but fully explicit and copiously indexed for the specialist, this work will serve as the bedrock for future progress in the study of these languages.

Diachronic developments in fricative + nasal sequences: a Tibeto-Burman case study

Journal of Historical Linguistics, 2021

Through comparison of regular sound correspondences in three closely related Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages, Ersu, Lizu, and Duoxu (collectively "ELD"), informed by external comparison with other TB languages and recent phonetic analyses of the production of voiceless nasals, we reconstruct *fricative-nasal sequences in their common ancestor, Proto-ELD. In the development of these historic clusters, two pathways of change can be recognized. Their difference lies in the divergent relative phasing of velic and oral gestures in the original fricative-nasal sequences: (i) fricative weakening (from a tight cluster): *FN > N ̥ > h̃ > x (ii) fricative strengthening (from a loose cluster): *F-n > *F-t > t > k or *F-n > s The different reflexes observed in Ersu, Lizu, and Duoxu represent different points along these two developmental pathways. These reconstructions and pathways of development have implications for our understanding of both universal (phonetic) and language-specific aspects of change in fricative-nasal sequences. The first pathway makes it possible to explore the process of nasal devoicing beyond voiceless nasals so as to enrich our understanding of nasal devoicing in natural languages. The coexistence of two opposite pathways of change, on the other hand, provides insights into the morphological and syllabic structure of words with contiguous fricative-nasal sequences in ELD languages at different points in time-insights that may be valuable in examining the history of other languages and language families beyond the ELD cluster.

The Tonal and Intonational Phonology of Lhasa Tibetan

This dissertation provides a comprehensive description of the tonal and intona- tional phonology of Lhasa Tibetan (LT) in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. It is based on recorded data elicited from members of the Tibetan-Canadian community in Ottawa and Toronto. The first two chapters of the dissertation contain background information about LT, a summary of previous research on LT tones and intonation, and an overview of the theoretical framework and conceptual tools used in the rest of the dissertation. The third chapter deals with word tonology. I establish that the prosodic structure of LT brings evidence for four main constituents at or below the word level: a) the mora encodes vowel length contrasts, b) the syllable is the tone-bearing unit (TBU), c) the prosodic word, which is maximally binary, delimits the application of most tonal processes, and d) the prosodic word group, which matches grammatical words, is the domain of downstep. This prosodic structure provides evidence against the universality of the Prosodic Hierarchy (Selkirk, 2002; Nespor and Vogel, 2007) in that it has no phonological phrase, but has two word-level constituents. I then argue that LT has three lexical tones (H, LH, and L) – L being limited to some suffixes – and propose that these lexical tones are subject to tone rules applying within the prosodic word and the prosodic word group. These tone rules are similar to those proposed by Duanmu (1992), but have been improved to accurately predict the tone patterns of long polysyllabic words. Based on phonetic evidence, I also come to the conclusion that LT no longer has stress, and that the stress pattern found in other Bodic varieties has been reinterpreted as a part of the tonal system. The fourth chapter analyses phrasal prosody. I argue that LT forms intona- tional phrases around clauses and marks them with nal lengthening, pitch reset, and a limited set of boundary tones (H% and L%). Although communicative functions and information structure are mostly realized by means of final particles and morphosyntactic devices in LT, I show that boundary tones, focal tones, and deac- centing interact with word tones to form complex melodic patterns. In the fifth chapter, I present a phonologically-based F0 synthesis model to verify the adequacy of the proposed Autosegmental-Metrical model of LT. This F0 synthesis model consists of three main components: a) the tonal targets defined in previous chapters, b) an F0 interpolation component based on the PENTA model (Xu, 2004), and c) an evaluation component allowing a comparison of the F0 contours of real LT utterances with resynthesized F0 contours of the same utterances. The F0 synthesis model is able to generate F0 contours that approximate the F0 contours of real LT recordings, suggesting that the proposed phonological model adequately captures the overall tonal and intonational phonology of LT.

Book Notice: The Historical Phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese (2019)

Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, 2021

In this historical linguistic treatise, Hill utilizes comparative linguistic data from Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese—three related languages with ancient literary traditions—to summarize the historical phonological relationships among these languages with respect to their membership in the Trans-Himalayan (TH hereafter) language family (aka. Sino-Tibetan). With reference to key preceding research, and while acknowledging the periodic lack of "exceptionless phonological patterns", Hill concisely presents an assemblage of reconstructions of the phoneme systems and key sound changes from TH to later stages of TH branches to more recent stages of the languages. Thus, this work can serve as a reference for historical phonological investigation of those languages, TH as a whole, or neighboring contact languages outside the language family.

Voiceless Nasal Sounds in Three Tibeto-Burman Languages

This paper focuses on two types of voiceless nasal sounds in Xumi, a Tibeto-Burman language: (1) the voiceless aspirated nasals /m̥/ [m̥h̃] and /n̥/ [n̥h̃]; and (2) the voiceless nasal glottal fricative [h̃]. We provide a synchronic description of these two types of sounds, and explore their similarities and differences. Xumi voiceless nasal consonants are described with reference to the voiceless nasal consonants /m̥/ and /n̥/ in Burmese and Kham Tibetan, because Burmese voiceless nasals are the best described type of voiceless nasals, and are therefore used as a reference point for comparison; whereas voiceless nasals in Kham Tibetan, which is in close contact with Xumi, represent a characteristic regional feature. The synchronic description is based on acoustic and aerodynamic measurements (the total duration of the target phonemes, the duration of the voiced period during the target phonemes, mean nasal and oral flow). Our study (i) contributes to a better understanding of voiceless nasals as a type of sound; (ii) provides a first-ever instrumental description (acoustic and aerodynamic) of the voiceless nasal glottal fricative [h̃], as attested in a number of Tibeto-Burman languages of Southwest China; and (iii) suggests a possible phonetic basis for the observed dialectal and diachronic variation between voiceless nasals and [h̃] in some Tibeto-Burman languages.