• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

DUHUMBI GLOTTAL STOP AND GLOTTAL CONSTRICTION The phonologic position of the glottal stop /ʔ/ in Duhumbi is elusive. The glottal stop and glottal constriction are clearly phonetic features among all speakers of all varieties of the language. However, there is no convincing evidence that it occurs as a distinctive phoneme. Rather, the glottal stop co-occurs as a glottal closure on onset vowels /a, e, i, o/, as a sub-phonemic feature combined with creaky voice and rising pitch on certain open vowels /a, e, o, u/, or as allophone of the plosives, mainly the velar plosive /k/, in coda position in certain phonotactic environments. In the following description, the first section describes the occurrence of the glottal stop in syllable- initial position. The next section describes the occurrence of the glottal stop as allophone of the (velar) plosive in coda position. Debucallisation of the syllable-final (velar) plosive can be shown to result in sandhi forms depending on morphophonotactic position of the velar plosive. Because of this diachronic process of lenition, minimal pairs that appear to show the opposition between the plosive /k/ and the glottal stop /ʔ/ are shown to solely depend on the morphophonotactic position. The final section describes the distinctive Duhumbi vowels /aq, eq, oq, uq/. GLOTTALISED VOCALIC ONSETS In Duhumbi, there are not many instances of onset vowels in unique roots, mainly limited to prefixes, interjections and Bodish and Tshangla loans, with only a limited number of occurrences in native lexemes. Excluding the prefixes, the most common onset vowel is /u/, followed by /a/ and /o/. There are only a handful of instances of onset vowels /i/, all in native lexemes, and /e/, mainly in loans. Three of the most widely used prefixes have a vocalic onset, namely the kinship prefix a- (marginally o-/u-); the adjective prefix o- and the adjective prefix u-. Hence, onset vowels are common in lexemes containing the basic question morpheme a, e.g. abe ‘what’; adi ‘how’; apʰi ‘how much’; and the basic demonstrative o this and its derivatives, e.g. 0ʨʰi ‘this here’, okʰo ‘there’, ose ‘like this/that’. They also occur as prefixes on nouns such as okʰow ‘liquid’; ojow ‘fat’; utɕʰaŋ ‘lid’; udam ‘piece’; uguŋ ‘spirit, shadow’; ulap ‘leaf’; uli ‘seed’; uɕu ‘fruit’; utʰuŋ ‘stem’; ujuŋ ‘handle’, where they often correspond with a- in other Western Kho-Bwa languages. Other occurrences vocalic onsets in native lexemes include ak {ta} ‘get stuck’; an {da} ‘select’; ar {da} ‘become dry’; at {da} ‘kill’; aw {da} ‘itch’; aj {da} ‘see’; en {da} ‘be spilt’; i {da} ‘die’; is {ta} ‘recognise’; ir {da} ‘ride, mount (a horse)’; in {da} ‘say’; ikku ‘hiccup’; om ‘three’; om {ta} ‘keep waiting’; oŋ {da} ‘go’; oŋ {ta} ‘fit’; orba ‘snore’; oj ‘husband; uk ‘hide ; ur ‘arrow body’; ur {ta} ‘mix’. Onsets in vowel position are also found in Bodish and Tshangla loans, such as akpu crow, cf. TT akpu, TSB akpakʰa; alak branch, cf. BL alak; am mango, cf. Tshangla amse > Hin. आम aːm; ani nun, cf. Tib. a-ni; ara liquor, cf. TSB ara; emriŋ swastika, cf. Tib. g.yuṅ-druṅ, TSD emriŋ; eri raw silk, cf. TSD eri ~ elin; er Kaleej pheasant, cf. TT er, BL er; ortoŋ internal part of throat, cf. TSB ɔrtɔŋ throat. Finally, we widely find onset vowels commonly in interjections and pauses, such as ah ‘ehm’; akej ‘oops’; ana ‘right, ok, well’; atsow ‘ouch’; aj ‘ok’; eh ‘oh’; oŋ ‘yes, right’ and owej ‘hey’. Except for the close back vowel /u/, all the other vowels, when occurring in onset position, whether in open or in closed syllables, are preceded by a non-phonemic glottal stop or glottal constriction, which is usually and most clearly manifested in creaky voice of the vowel. This can be shown in the spectrograms and waveforms for the respective tokens and minimal pair ar {da} [ʔa̰ɹ ~ ˀa̰ɹ] ‘to dry’, 1 er [ʔɛ̰ɹ ~ ˀɛ̰ɹ] ‘blood pheasant’; ir {da} [ʔḭɹ ~ ˀḭɹ] ‘to mount and ride (a horse)’; orba [ʔɔ̰ɹbaː ~ ˀɔ̰ɹbaː] ‘a snore’; but ur {ta} [uɹ] ‘to mix (flour in boiling water to a dough); to scratch (scalp and hair); to hold and shake (someone by clothes or arms)’. As can be seen in the respective spectrograms and waveforms (Figures 1-5), all vocalic onsets except the vowel /u/ show a more or less pronounced glottal onset and in all cases creaky voice that is not phonotactically conditioned by the following rhotic consonant but the result of the preceding glottal onset. 2 Figures 1-5. Spectrograms and waveforms of pre-glottalised vocalic onsets The creakiness of vocalic onsets /a, e, i, o/ is a highly pronounced phonetic feature, with impact on all the surrounding vowels. Hence, the choice of a carrier sentence (goq ___ innyi) with a glottal constriction preceding and following the tokens was one of the major methodological flaws of the PhD research, as this influenced the quality of tokens with vocalic onsets and open rhymes tremendously. The situation in Duhumbi has some parallels in other languages, and from a historical-comparative point of view perhaps, most noteably with Tibetan. In written Tibetan, the onset ཨུ་ is almost exclusively found in loans and nativised loans from Sanskrit (such as ut-pal ‘blue poppy Meconposis sp.’, cf. Sanskrit ut-pa-la ‘blue lotus’), Chinese (such as u-yon ‘committee member’, cf. Chinese 委员 wěiyuán ‘committee member’) and Mongol (such as u-rge ‘the top of a tent pole that protrudes above the canvas’, cf. Monglian Өрх [ɵrx] ‘top of the tent’). There are hardly any native Tibetan lexemes that have the onset ཨུ་, if any at all; however, the same can be said of the vocalic onset that are written in Tibetan as ཨི་, ཨོ་ and ཨེ་: all of these occur almost exclusively in Sanskrit, Chinese or Mongolian loans. In fact, the only common onset is ཨ་, which is, for example, common in kinship terms. On the other hand, the vocalic onset འུ་ is much more common, and occurs in what may be presumed to be native lexemes, such as ḥu-lag ‘compulsory post or labour service’, ḥu-su ‘coriander’, ḥug-pa ‘owl’, ḥud ‘swaggering, boasting’, ḥub-pa ‘to collect, to sweep together’ and ḥur ‘busy activity, rush’. Zhang (1987: 41–6) analysed the Tibetan letter ཨ that Hill (2010: 115) transcribes as q as representing a glottal stop in Old Tibetan. Hill (2010: 115-116), however, argues against this analysis and observes that q functions in the Tibetan script as a null consonant marking a vocalic onset. He does, however, remark that, perhaps, in Old Tibetan all vowel-initial words might have been articulated with a sub-phonemic glottal stop, similar to German. As for the Tibetan grapheme འ་, Hill (2005), transcribing it with v, argues on basis of evidence from Tibetan dialects that when preceding a vowel onset and the labial approximant -w-, it represents a voiced velar fricative [ɣ]. 3 Contemporary evidence from Duhumbi indicates that in onset position and particularly monosyllabically, the point and manner of articulation of the vowel /u/ trigger a more open, voiced or perhaps breathy onset closer to a voiced glottal fricative onset [ɦu], whereas all the other vowels have a clear glottal reinforcement in the form of an unvoiced glottal plosive preceding the vowel onset which results in creakiness of the vowel, i.e. [ʔa̰, ʔɛ̰, ʔḭ, ʔɔ̰]. However, the voiced glottal fricative and the unvoiced glottal plosive and creakiness of the vowel have only a sub-phonemic status. The glottal onsets of the vowels /a, e, i, o/ are represented in the phonetic transcription, but not in the phonemic transcription, used for transcribing the Duhumbi texts. GLOTTALISATION OF THE CODA PLOSIVES Among Duhumbi speakers there are various realisations of the syllable-final velar plosive /k/ following the open and open-mid back vowels /a, o, e, i/. Glottal reinforcement of these rhymes is extremely common, not only in Duhumbi, but also in other languages, such as Tshangla (Bodt 2014). Whereas the rhyme -ak/-ok/-ek/-ik may be realised pre-glottalised and released [-ˀk] or pre- glottalised and unreleased [-ˀk̚], it is also commonly realised as glottal stop combined with creaky phonation on the vowel [a̰ʔ], [ɔ̰ʔ] [ḛʔ], [ḭʔ] or simply as a creaky vowel [a̰], [ɔ̰], [ḛ], [ḭ]. A coda velar stop preceded by vowel /a/ in a monosyllabic word or as the coda ultima of a polysyllabic word in isolation is elided in Khispi with subsequent lengthening of the vowel to [aː] but commonly realised as a glottal stop with maintenance of the short vowel length in Duhumbi [aʔ], i.e. *[-ak] > Duh. [-aʔ] / Khis. [-aː]. As the waveform and spectrograms (Figures 6-8) show, the exact realisation of the syllable-final velar plosive, even when spoken in a single sequence by a single speaker, varies between an unreleased velar plosive [bʲɛk̚] with little or no creaky voice, and an increase in the degree of creakiness in the vowel of [bʲɛ̰ʔ]. 4 Figure 6. Waveform and spectrogram of bek {da} [bʲɛk̰ ]̚ ‘ripen, mature (vi)’. Figure 7. Waveform and spectrogram of bek {da} [bʲɛʔ]̰ ‘ripen, mature (vi)’. 5 Figure 8. Waveform and spectrogram of bek {da} [bʲɛʔ]̰ ‘ripen, mature (vi)’. Phonotactic conditions play a major role in the extent to which glottalisation and glottal replacement of coda plosives occurs. Released and unreleased realisations are more commonly attested when a root is followed by an unvoiced suffix, glottaly constricted realisations are more often observed when followed by a syllable with a voiced onset. An example are the verb roots, such as the minimal pairs dek {da} ‘shoot’ and dek {ta} ‘be stunted’.

Load more

  11

Copy Link