Kuki-Thaadow: An African Tone System in Southeast Asia (original) (raw)

Studying Tones in North East India: Tai, Singpho and Tangsa

Language Documentation & Conservation, 2014

Drawing on nearly 20 years of study of a variety of languages in North East India, from the Tai and Tibeto-Burman families, this paper examines the issues involved in studying those languages, building on three well established principles: (a) tones are categories within a language, and the recognition of those categories is the key step in describing the tonal system; (b) in at least some languages, tones are a bundle of features, of which (relative) pitch is only one; and (c) tones may carry different levels of functional load in different languages.

IMPLICATIONS FOR POST-LEXICAL TONAL TYPOLOGY: AN ANALYSIS OF THADOU AND MIZO TONES

This paper focuses on the post-lexical tonal properties in Thadou and Mizo, the two Kuki Chin languages spoken in NorthEast India, and tries to typologize them based on the interaction of phonetic and phonological modules in the grammar of these languages. The paper investigates the different downtrending phenomenon like the declination, downdrift and downstep and accounts how the pitch is realized differently in each of these languages. The study reveals that the gradient implementation of certain phenomena in the phonetic component may be severely constrained by the nature of the lexical and post-lexical phonological component in a language. The results of this investigation thus reveal two varied types of post-lexical tones among the Kuki-Chin group of languages.

Tones in Tani languages: A fieldworker's guide

This paper will have two purposes. The first will be to describe the tone systems of the three Tani (Tibeto-Burman) languages for which tones have been attested: Apatani, Galo (Western Tani) and Upper Minyong (Eastern Tani). The second will be to provide a sort of guide for fieldworkers investigating tones in Tani languages. Here’s the basic overview: Tani languages have two underlying (or basic) tonemes, which can be called H and L, Level and Falling, Toneless and Toneful or Unmarked and Marked, depending on how one feels about the balance between theoretical implications and descriptive clarity. The point is that there are two categories, one of which is associated to a relatively mid-to-high and level pitch contour, and the other of which is associated to a low, falling, rising, or rising-falling pitch contour, depending on a number of contextual factors. The second category is more “marked” than the first, on phonological, perceptual, and phonetic grounds. All lexical morphemes are underlyingly specified for one of these two tones. If a word is monosyllabic and monomorphemic, the specified tone will be projected directly onto the surface pitch contour. However, the overwhelming majority of words in Tani are in fact disyllabic or larger, and generally dimorphemic, or larger. In these more complex words, certain derivations apply. These derivations are slightly different from language to language, but all obey a similar set of principles requiring reference to the structure of a word’s constituent syllables: light or heavy, i.e. monomoraic (V rhyme) or bimoraic (VV, Ṽ or VC rhyme) - as well as, to some extent, the rhythmic template of a language (generally trochaic) and some morphophonological processes (such as syncope) which are associated with it. Due to the interaction of all of these factors, it can be a real challenge to unify one’s account of the relationship between the underlying tones of morphemes and the phonetic pitch contour of words in which they are expressed. By the same token, it can be a real challenge, from a fieldworker’s perspective, to work one’s way from the quite complex surface pitch contour of a string of morphemes all the way down to the underlying (and quite simple!) set of tonal categories that ultimately motivate it. My main hope in writing this paper is that I’ll be able to outline a set of procedures to render the discovery and representation of tones in Tani languages less painful, less time-consuming and less error-prone, and - ideally - maximize the chances that other fieldworkers will be able to expand our Tani language tonal database, so that we can get ourselves on a more solid comparative-historical footing!

Lee Bickmore, ,Chilungu Phonology (2007) CSLI Publications, University of Chicago Press,Stanford

2009

Cilungu Phonology provides a comprehensive description of the intricate and diverse tone system of Cilungu, a Bantu language of Zambia classified as M14 in Guthrie's (1967Guthrie's ( -1971 Bantu classification. An asset of this work for which the author must be commended is that it provides a thorough and fully worked out tone system of a particular language in contrast to fragments of tonal systems abounding in the Bantu literature.

Studying emergent tone-systems in Nepal: Pitch, phonation and word-tone in Tamang

Language Documentation & Conservation, 2014

This paper focuses on the particular kinds of difficulties which arise in the study of an emergent tone-system, exemplified by Tamang in Nepal, where pitch, phonation and other laryngeal features combine in the definition of a tone. As a consequence, conducting a well-ordered analysis in stages first of phonetic transcription, then variation in context, then interpretation is not possible. Rather we have to discover the contrasting categories first, and study their phonetic realization next, or do both at the same time. This also leads to questioning the validity of the traditional distinction of features into “distinctive” and “redundant” and proposing instead an analysis of an abstract “tone” as a bundle of cues. We will only sketch the second characteristic of the Tamang tone system, the extension of tone over the phonological word. The contributions of instrumental studies and of a comparative-historical perspective are discussed.