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Sumi Tone: a Phonological and Phonetic Description of a Tibeto-Burman Language of Nagaland

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Sumi Tone: a Phonological and Phonetic Description of a Tibeto-Burman Language of Nagaland Sumi tone: a phonological and phonetic description of a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland Amos Benjamin Teo Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Masters by Research (by Thesis Only) December 2009 School of Languages and Linguistics The University of Melbourne Abstract Previous research on Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the extreme northeast of India, has found it to have three lexical tones. However, the few phonological studies of Sumi have focused mainly on its segmental phonology and have failed to provide any substantial account of the tone system. This thesis addresses the issue by providing the first comprehensive description of tone in this language. In addition to confirming three contrastive tones, this study also presents the first acoustic phonetic analysis of Sumi, looking at the phonetic realisation of these tones and the effects of segmental perturbations on tone realisation. The first autosegmental representation of Sumi tone is offered, allowing us to account for tonal phenomena such as the assignment of surface tones to prefixes that appear to be lexically unspecified for tone. Finally, this investigation presents the first account of morphologically conditioned tone variation in Sumi, finding regular paradigmatic shifts in the tone on verb roots that undergo nominalisation. The thesis also offers a cross-linguistic comparison of the tone system of Sumi with that of other closely related Kuki-Chin-Naga languages and some preliminary observations of the historical origin and development of tone in these languages are made. This is accompanied by a typological comparison of these languages with other Tibeto-Burman languages, which shows that although these languages are spoken in what has been termed the ‘Indosphere’, their tone systems are similar to those of languages spoken further to the east in the ‘Sinosphere’. Finally, a more global typological comparison of Sumi with ‘African’ and ‘East Asian’ tone languages demonstrates that Sumi displays features typically associated with both these language ‘types’. This finding suggests the need to re-evaluate this traditional dichotomy of tone systems, and the need to consider morphological structure in typologies of tone. This is to certify that: (i) the thesis comprises only my original work towards the Masters, (ii) due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used, (iii) the thesis is approximately 36,000 words in length, inclusive of footnotes, but exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices. Amos Benjamin Teo December 2009 Acknowledgements I am indebted to a number of people responsible for my education on Nagaland and the Sumi language in particular. First and foremost, I reserve my deepest gratitude for Inotoli Zhimomi, whom I met while doing a linguistic field methods course run by Professor Nick Evans at the University of Melbourne in 2007. Without her time, energy and support for this project, there would certainly be no thesis. Many thanks also go to Inotoli’s family – to her husband Nick Lenaghan and her sister Nikhüli Zhimomi (Anikhü) for their continued support in this project, especially for all the times when they had to mind the children or take over the preparation of food (be it the smoking of amichi or the cooking of axone ) while I bombarded Inotoli with questions about her language. (A special apology goes to Kivi and Kupo for all the times I stole their aza away from meal time and playtime.) Certainly, I cannot thank enough the other members of the Zhimomi family: Inotoli’s parents in Vishepu; her sisters Ilika (Alika) in Hyderabad and Bokali in Zunheboto, as well as Bokali’s husband Hekato for their wonderful hospitality during my visit to India in early 2009. I owe a debt of gratitude to Jekügha Assümi and his wife Hekali for welcoming me into their home in Zunheboto, especially to Jekügha, who very kindly donated his time to be recorded and who offered me his own personal copy of Hutton’s The Sema Nagas . During this same trip to Nagaland, I had the honour of meeting a number of esteemed members of the Sumi community, including Mr S. Rotokha, the secretary of the Sumi Literature Board and Mr Hokishe Yepthomi, who presented me with a copy of his English-Sumi dictionary. I was also given the privilege of speaking with the Reverend Yevuto who offered a brief history of the Bible’s translation into Sumi and presented me with a copy of the Sumi Bible. Special mention must go to Bernice Dzuvichu, who was responsible for getting me the Restricted Area Permit that allowed me to legally enter the state of Nagaland (despite my not travelling as a group of four people, or as a married couple). In the preparation of this thesis, my deepest thanks go to my supervisors Associate Professor Janet Fletcher and Professor John Hajek at the University of Melbourne. Without their invaluable feedback and guidance, both in the process of conducting the research and in the writing process, this thesis would be nothing more than a collection of badly written and ill-formed ideas. Additional thanks go to Alec Coupe, who very kindly gave me a copy of his book A phonetic and phonological description of Ao: a Tibeto-Burman language and also lent me his copies of Geoffrey Marrison’s work. Finally, I would like to extend my gratitude to all my friends and colleagues, including Sara Ciesielski, Lauren Gawne, Hywel Stoakes, Deborah Loakes, Mary Stevens, Belinda Ross and Thomas Harris. In particular, I must thank Aung Si, who kindly proofread much of the final draft and provided me with the Burmese examples used in this thesis. I am also very grateful to Olga Maxwell, who assisted both in the proofreading of my earlier drafts and in the provision of much appreciated cocoa products. Table of contents List of abbreviations used....................................................................................................1 1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................2 1.1 Aims of study .........................................................................................................2 1.2 Language description..............................................................................................5 1.2.1 Linguistic situation ..........................................................................................5 1.2.2 Genetic relationships .......................................................................................8 1.2.3 Previous work on Sumi .................................................................................12 1.2.4 Note on orthography......................................................................................15 1.3 Studies of tone in Kuki-Chin-Naga languages .....................................................16 1.4 Lexical tone ..........................................................................................................18 1.4.1 Tone languages..............................................................................................19 1.4.2 Autosegmental representation of tone ...........................................................20 1.4.3 Phonetic correlates of tone ............................................................................21 1.4.4 Tone language typologies..............................................................................23 2 Methodology................................................................................................................28 2.1 Participants ...........................................................................................................28 2.2 Recording equipment............................................................................................28 2.3 Carrier phrases......................................................................................................29 2.4 Acoustic phonetic analysis ...................................................................................30 2.5 Tone comparison chart .........................................................................................33 3 Segmental Phonology..................................................................................................36 3.1 Phoneme Inventory...............................................................................................36 3.2 Consonants ...........................................................................................................38 3.2.1 Plosives..........................................................................................................38 3.2.2 Fricatives and Affricates................................................................................39 3.2.3 Nasals and Laterals........................................................................................41 3.2.4 Approximants ................................................................................................42 3.2.5 Trill ................................................................................................................43 3.2.6 Minimal sets ..................................................................................................43 3.3 Regular phonological processes associated with consonants...............................45 3.3.1 Palatalisation .................................................................................................45 3.4 Vowels..................................................................................................................45
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