Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) Tonsawang annotation notes
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Annotation notes for ELDP project IPF0246 (deposit id:0434) - Tonsawang: a collaborative multimedia project documenting an endangered language of North Sulawesi.
1. Background information
1.1 Geography The Tonsawang (IS0 639-3 TNW) speech community is one of the smallest (Henley 1998:48; Schouten 1998:13-4) and most isolated (Sneddon 1970:19) of the nine which traditionally inhabit the Minahasan districts in the northern tip of the island of Sulawesi (Map 1.1). The Tonsawang (also Toundanow or Tombatu) people presently live a collection of villages and one large town in a mountainous area in the southern part of the Minahasan peninsula. The community is bordered by the much larger Tontemboan (IS0 639-3 TNT) speech area to the north and west, and the smaller, non-Minahasan Ponosaken (IS0 639-3 PNS) and Ratahan (Torátan) (IS0 639-3 RTH) language communities to the east and south (Map 1.2).
Map 1.1: The northern tip of Sulawesi in Indonesia
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Map 1.2: Approximate boundaries of linguistic and ethnic groups
1.2 Speech community, linguistic vitality, and speaker numbers Tonsawang community members are the largest proportion of inhabitants of the Minahasa Tenggara ‘Southeast Minahasa’ district, which also includes speakers of the Ponosakan and Ratahan languages. The most-recent (2018) population figure for the entire district is 105,714 (Badan Pusat Statistik 2018). However, numbers of fluent Tonsawang speakers are far fewer than this. Anecdotal evidence and observation during fieldwork indicates a language which is not dominant in any domains of use and for which fluent speakers are restricted to elderly community members. Estimations from more than 30 years ago (Sneddon 1983; Wurm & Hattori 1981) have Tonsawang speaker numbers at 20,000. While any figure provided here would be speculative, an optimistic estimation would be a total of 8,000-10,000.
Levels of linguistic vitality are low and there is an entrenched shift to the language of wider communication, Manado Malay (IS0 639-3 XMM) (Merrifield & Salea 1996; Hertz & Lee 2006; Mead 2013), a process which has been ongoing for over a century (Wolff 2010:299). The assessment of Mead (2013:124ff) utilises the six point vitality and endangerment rating of UNESCO (2003:6-16) and the ten point Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS) of Lewis & Simons (2010). Using these diagnostics Tonsawang is rated as
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______“definitely endangered, though clearly trending towards severely endangered” and “shifting”, respectively (Mead 2013:124).
1.3 Participant metadata and recording genres Table 1.1 provides metadata pertaining to the speech community members who were recorded as part of ELDP IPF 0246.
PARTICIPANT: GENDER: AGE: LOCATION: JPP Male 70 Kali Oki JP Female 66 Kali Oki MP Male 52 Silian MT Female 54 Kali Oki OK Male 41 Silian YK Male 68 Silian BP Male 86 Silian RP Male 58 Tombatu KPK Female 56 Tombatu SM Male 51 Kali Oki VA Male 24 Silian MP Male 49 Kali Oki
The Tonsawang corpus includes recordings of a range of different communicative events. These are categorised as follows:
i. Monologue (Narrative) – Recordings in which a speaker narrates culturally relevant material he/she has chosen. These may be myths and folk tales or descriptions of historical events which occurred in the region, including family and village history. Speakers also discuss traditional rituals, e.g. funeral rites or wedding traditions.
ii. Monologue (Procedural narrative) – Recordings in which a speaker outlines the procedures for undertaking common cultural and economic activities, such as: cash crop cultivation, food preparation, or house building. Speakers also watch and narrate similar procedures which are occurring in specially prepared and edited elicitation videos.
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______iii. Dialogues – Recordings in which two speakers discuss similar topics to those occurring in monologues. Dialogues also include recordings in which two speakers discuss the background of indigenous songs before singing these songs together.
iv. Elicitation videos – Short, documentary style videos which have been filmed together with speech community members. These demonstrate various different agricultural, craft, and food preparation activities. These are then edited to a semi-professional standard using the Abode Premier Pro CC editing suite. Narration in indigenous languages with English subtitles are added. These videos function as a long-lasting ethnographic record and as elicitation stimuli for additional data collection.
2. Typological information Analysis of data collected as part of ELDP IPF 0246 is ongoing. The following are preliminary descriptions of a number of aspects of Tonsawang phonology and morphosyntax.
2.1 Phoneme inventory The nativeTonsawang consonant inventory consists of sixteen phonemes at four places of articulation. Phonmes which occur in loan words are not outlined here.
Bilabial: Labio-dental: Alveolar: Palatal: Velar: Glottal:
Voiceless plosive: p t k Voiced plosive: b d ɡ ʔ Nasal: m n ŋ Voiceless affricate: Voiced affricate: Voiceless fricative: s h Voiced fricative: Trill: r Lateral: l Glides: w j
Table 2.1: Consonant phonemes
The vowel inventory contains the five cardinal vowels and the mid-central schwa.
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______Front Central Back High i u Mid ɛ ǝ o Low a Table 2.2: Vowel phonemes
2.1 Verbal morphology Multiple voice marking system: The Tonsawang language demonstrates a four way voicing system comprising one Actor and three Undergoer voices. These distinctions are encoded morphologically on verbs via the use of affixes from the paradigm outlined in Table 2.3.
Voice marking: Affix:
Actor voice (Actor)
Patient voice (Undergoer) -en
Locative voice (Undergoer) -an
Conveyance voice (Undergoer) i-/ø
Table 2.3: Voice marking affixes
Tense, aspect, and mood: Two tenses and two aspects are differentiated in the language - past and non-past and perfective and imperfective. Non-past and perfective are unmarked while past and imperfective are marked morphologically with affixes, including reduplication for imperfective aspect. In certain instances tense and aspect markers are conflated with voice marking in complex verbal stems. The specific mood marking strategies are not entirely clear.
Table 2.4 demonstrates a selection of the interactions of voice, tense, and aspect marking1 on the root word sa’uh ‘mix’
Voice: Non-past Past Perfective Imperfective
AV s
ma-sa’uh i-ma-sa’uh ma-sa’uh meN-sa’u-sa’uh
PV sa’uh-en s
1 A number of the complex stems in Table 2.2 also display the ma- (AV) and pa- (UV) DYNAMIC verbal affixes.
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______pa-sa’uh-en pa-sa’uh-en peN-sa’u-sa’uh-en
p
LV sa’uh-an s
pa-sa’uh-an p
CV i-sa’uh bè-sa’uh i-sa’uh i-pa-sa’u-sa’uh-en
i-pa-sa’uh i-pa-sa’uh i-peN-sa’u-sa’uh-en
Table 2.4: Tense and aspect marking
2.2 Personal pronominals The precise forms and syntactic functions of all personal pronominals are not currently clear. As presented in Tables 2.5 and 2.6, there are multiple paradigms containing both independent and bound forms. With one exception, enclitic pronominals are exculsive to the first, second, and third person singular. Set C clitics are hosted by various lexical categories and appear to be second position (2P) or Wackernagel clitics. Set D clitics appear most frequently hosted by derived verbs but are also attested on other lexical categories.
Set A Set B Set C Set D
1SG siahu iahu =ahu =ku
2SG sihow ihow =how =mu
3SG sisia isia =sia =na
1PL.IN kita ihita kita i=hita
1PL.EX kamitahula ihamtahula kamitahula i=kamitahula
2PL kamotahula ikamotahula kamotahula i=kamotahula
3PL silatahula ilatahula silatahula i=latahula
Table 2.5: Pronominal paradigms
In addition, a paradigm consisting of stems from the plural forms in Table 2.5, together with cardinal numerals from two – nine, function as Dual, Trial, and Count personal pronouns.
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______1st person 2nd person 3rd person
Two (rua) kitandua kamondua silandua
Three (telu) kitantelu kamontelu silantelu
Four (epat) kitanepat kamonepat silanepat
Five (lima) kitanlima kamonlima silanlima
Six (enem) kitanenem kamonenem silanenem
Seven (pitu) kitanpitu kamonpitu silanpitu
Eight (walu) kitanwalu kamonwalu silanwalu
Nine (siow) kitansiow kamonsiow silansiow
Table 2.6:Dual, Trial, and Count pronominal paradigm
3. Abbreviations for morpheme glossing Table 3.1 lists the abbreviations used for morpheme glossing in the project ELAN (.eaf) files.
1 first person MULT multiplicative 2 second person MUT mutual marker 3 third person NR nominaliser AN animate NON.SPEC non-specific ASSOC associative ORD ordinal AV Actor voice PART particle CAUS causative PL plural CMP completive PN proper noun CV Conveyance voice POT potentive verbal affix DIR directional PRO full pronoun DIST distal PROH prohibative DYN dynamic verbal affix PST past tense EPIS epistemic PROX proximate EXIST existential marker PV Patient voice GEN genitive REL relative HES hesitation REAL realis INAN inanimate RDP reduplication INCMP incompletive REFL reflexive IRR irrealis REQ requestive LNK linker SG singular LV Locative voice STAT Stative verbal affix MANN manner TOP dislocated topic MED medial
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______Table 3.1:Glossing abbreviations
References Badan Pusat Statistik Provinsi Sulawesi Utara. 2018. Jumlah penduduk menurut kabupaten/kota 2000-2017, accessed 27 February 2018, sulut.bps.go.id/dynamictable/2018/01/18/180/jumlah-penduduk-menurut-kabupaten-kota-di- provinsi-sulawesi-utara-2000---2017.html
Henley, David. 1998. Nationalism and regionalism in colonial Indonesia: The case of Minahasa. Leiden: KITLV Press.
Hertz, Regina & Lee, Sandra. 2006. Report of language survey on the Tondano language. Unpublished typescript. Dallas: SIL Indonesia Survey Team.
Hirabayashi, Teruo. 2003. Code selection of Bahasa Tonsawang in Minahasa, North Sulawesi. Osaka: Endangered Languages of the Pacific Rim, A3-015. Lewis, M. Paul; and Gary F. Simons. 2010. Assessing endangerment: Expanding Fishman’s GIDS. Revue Roumaine de Linguistique 55(2):103–120. Mead, David. 2013. An initial assessment of the vitality of the indigenous languages in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. North Carolina: Sulawesi language alliance. Manuscript in preparation. Schouten, Mieke. J. C. 1998. Leadership and social mobility in a Southeast Asian society: Minahasa, 1677-1983. Leiden: KITLV Press. Sneddon, James. N. 1983a. Northern Celebes (Sulawesi). Language atlas of the Pacific area, part 2: Japan area, Taiwan (Formosa), Philippines, mainland and insular South-east Asia (Pacific Linguistics, C-67), edited by Stephen A. Wurm and Shirô Hattori, map 43. Canberra: Australian National University, Australian Academy of the Humanities and The Japan Academy. Wurm, Stephen. & Hattori, Shiro (eds.). 1981. Language atlas of the Pacific area. Australian Academy of the Humanities and The Japan Academy. Canberra: Australian National University. Wolff, John. A.1996. Causes of language attrition in Ratahan: a research agenda. Paper presented at the11th International Workshop on Southeast Asian Studies, Leiden, 8th-13th December.
UNESCO. 2003. Language vitality and endangerment. Report approved by the participants of the International Expert Meeting on the UNESCO Programme Safeguarding of Endangered Language, Paris, 10–12 March 2003, accessed 02 January, 2018, unesco.org/culture/ich/doc/src/00120-EN.pdf.
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