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Pitch and Tone.Pdf PITCH AND TONE [This file is accompanied by five zip files that contain the sound recordings on which this analysis is based. These include the plosive codas, the plosive onsets, the fricative and affricate onsets, the nasal onsets, and the approximant onsets] The issue of suprasegmental phonological features such as tonality and stress are contentious in many Tibeto-Burman languages of the Eastern Himalayas. Possible realisations, distinctiveness and perceptions of these features may differ among native speakers, between native speakers and researchers, and among the researchers describing the language at different moments in time. Chinese linguists tend to describe every language as tonal, whereas Indian linguists generally do not mark tonal contrasts, even in languages that are phonologically the same whether spoken at the Tibetan or the Indian side of the border, as the descriptions of Puroik by Sun Hongkai et al. (1991) and Remsangpuia (2008) show. Other examples are the various descriptions of tone in Boro (see for an analysis Burling and Joseph 2010), in Lhasa Tibetan (see for a summary Mazaudon 2014: 590, 609), in rGyalronic languages (e.g. the analysis for Jiǎomùzú and the overview of other rGyalronic varieties in Prins (2011: 51-54)) and in Tshangla. As Morey (2014) mentioned, in many languages of the Eastern Himalayas, pitch and contour (change in pitch) are not the only defining features of tone. Rather, tone consists of a bundle of features that may include phonation (glottalisation and creakiness, breathiness, tenseness and laxness), duration and intensity. Not only Morey’s Tangsa, but also Watter’s Kham (), and other languages of the Eastern Himalayas display exactly this kind of complex interaction between different phonological features. Lowes (2009: ) describes the situation for Kurtoep where voiceless and voiceless aspirated obstruents are followed by the high tone, and voiced aspirated obstruents are followed by the low tone. TONE IN TSHANGLA The absence or presence of tone in Tshangla has been an issue that has divided linguists for a considerable time now. Depending on the origin and background of the speaker and the researcher, Tshangla is described as a language that has no tone, no distinctive tone, distinctive tone only on some onsets, or a language with distinctive high versus low register tone on all syllables. Perhaps the most interesting but unfortunately underrepresented feature of Das Gupta’s 1968 description of Dirang Tshangla is the assertion (1968:14) that ‘tone plays a significant part. As has been observed already, k and g, c and j, t and d, and p and b owe their distinction to their tonal values as well. Vowel lengths are also affected by tones’. He then lists the following examples: khu [rising] dog vs. khu [level] rice, sha [rising] meat vs. sha [level] tooth, ra [rising] brass vs. ra [level] paddy, shi [rising] excreta vs. shi [level] bamboo and nga [rising] fish vs. nga [level] full. Unfortunately, in the remainder of his work no further mention is made of lexical tone. Own research on Dirang Tshangla has thus far not resulted in conclusive evidence for minimal pairs that confirm the distinctiveness of tone in the Dirang Tshangla varieties. The data from Metok presented in Zhāng (1986), Anon. (1991), Sun and colleagues (1981) show a two-tonal (high level versus low rising) contrast on all syllables. In fact, the main difference in consonant inventory between standard Bhutan Tshangla and Pemakö Tshangla stems from the fact that Zhāng does not distinguish the voiced consonants from their unvoiced counterparts. Partially in line with what Das Gupta earlier asserted, Zhāng argues that the voiceless initial consonants are only present in syllables with a high tone, and that voiced initial consonants only occur in syllables with a low tone (Zhāng 1988:4). According to Zhāng, there is a distinct two-tone contrast, namely high-level or high-falling tone, which he represents by the high-level tone ˥ (55) and the low-level or low-rising tone which he represents as the low-rising tone ˨ (13) (Zhāng 1988:10-11). Thus, the voiceless plosives and fricatives /p/, /pʻ/, /t/, /tʻ/, /k/, /kʻ/, /ʔ/, /ts/, /tsʻ /, /tʂ/, /tʂʻ/, /ʨ/, /ʨʻ/, /s/, /ɬ/, /ʂ/ and /h/ and the complex onsets /pr/ and /pʻr/ are only present in the high-tone syllables, whereas the voiced plosives and fricatives /b/, /d/, /g/, /dz/, /dʐ/, /dʑ/ and /z/ and the complex onsets /br/ and /mr/ are only present in low-tone syllables. Zhāng does not present minimal pairs to confirm this theory. In fact, speakers themselves consider tone as non-distinctive, at least in the Didong dialect (Zhāng 1988:10). According to Zhāng, nine consonants can occur in both high-tone as well as low-tone syllables: [m], [n], [ŋ], [ȵ], [w], [l], [r], [j] and [ɕ] because of the change from [ʑ] to [ɕ]. He then continues to list 13 (near-) minimal pairs out of his total of 2128 lexemes. It is important to differentiate between native Tshangla lexemes and nativised borrowings and changed pronunciation as a result of contact with other languages. Thus, ŋa five might be realized as [ŋa˥] in Pemakö Tshangla under the influence of Tibetan high-register [ʼnga] (lnga), and jaŋ wealth, prosperity is a borrowing from Tibetan [ʼyang] (g.yang) through religious concepts such as jaŋ kʰukpe to conduct a ritual to accumulate wealth. Furthermore, in translating from one language to the other one has to be careful not to project semantic meanings onto the target language. For Bhutan Tshangla it was reported by authors such as Hoshi (1987:6), Egli-Roduner (1987), Wangdi (2005:56), van Driem (2001b) and Lowes (2006:94) that Tshangla does not have contrastive tone. This lack of tone distinction is even carried over by Tshangla speakers into other languages they might speak, including Dzongkha and Tibetan. In both languages, native Tshangla speakers do not pronounce the low-high initial tone contrast. This is a very typical feature by which Tshangla speakers of Dzongkha are easily distinguished from native Dzongkha speakers, or even Dzongkha speakers with another Central Bodish or even East Bodish language background, who are able to hear and produce tone differences. Andvik (1999:32, 2003) described Tshangla as contrasting high versus low tone following sonorant consonants for a small subset of words with some dialects currently replacing a contrast in voicing of initial obstruents with a contrast of high/low tone on the following vowel. Grollmann, finally, in the description of Bjokapakha Tshangla stated that “the differentiation of minimal pairs on the basis of register tones in Bjokapakha is, if present at all, only in the process of being built up and by no means an elaborated strategy”, with “not enough homophone lexemes to assume systematic tone differences in Bjokapakha”. As proposed in Bodt and Gyatso (2012) and Bodt (2012), ongoing research on the various Tshangla dialects in Bhutan and elsewhere is pointing to both the existence of distinctive tone in some varieties, the recent loss in other varieties, and ongoing tonogenesis in again other varieties. In Bodt (2012: 200) I argued that the various Tshangla varieties display a shift from distinctive syllable-final consonant clusters (Dirang Tshangla), to distinctive tone (Pemakö Tshangla), to distinctive morphophonological features and homonymy (Bhutan Tshangla). But there appear to be several independent and sometimes contradicting pathways to the development of distinctive lexical tone, including a loss of voicing of plosives, a loss of coda consonant clusters and the influence of coda glottal stops, and the introduction of tonal distinction through loanwords from language where lexical tone or register tone is distinctive, in particular Tibetan and Dzongkha. Tone in Tshangla, though, remains elusive, and unless detailed descriptions of the many Tshangla varieties become available will probably remain elusive in the near future. TONE IN DUHUMBI In order to analyse the absence or presence of tone in Duhumbi, an approach was taken as also advocated by various authors such as Morey (2014) and Mazaudon (2014). First, tonal contrasts were identified, then, the phonetic details of these contrasts were explored. The identification of tonal contrasts was through a combination of identifying minimal and near-minimal pairs. These minimal and near-minimal pairs were then discussed in detail with the main consultant, in which the core phrases became khengdeq [kʰʲɛŋdḛʔ] ‘it pulls’ and khengbang [kʰɛŋbaŋ] ‘it doesn’t pull’ or, in frequent code-shifting to Dirang Tshangla, the cognates jangkla [ʥaŋkla] and jangkmala [ʥaŋkmala] or in a curious creole of both as jangteq [ʥaŋtḛʔ] and jangpang [ʥaŋpaŋ]. ‘Pulling’ was the way in which the informant expressed what she described as a need to ‘pull up’ a consonant from somewhere, rather than simply letting it flow from the point of articulation outward. In the end, perhaps, simply accepting this extremely clever laywoman’s view of the issue turned out to quite neatly pin-point at the core of the suprasegmental phonological feature of tone. PLOSIVE CODAS AND PITCH CONTRAST The first general observation that can be made is that syllables ending in rhymes with a plosive consonant /k, t, p/ as well as the constricted vowel rhymes /-aq, -eq, -oq, -uq/ are almost unequivocally realised with a rising-falling pitch by all speakers. This observation implies that the rising-falling pitch pattern is a co-articulated, inherent feature of closed rhymes ending on the plosive consonants /k, t, p/ or a glottal stop/glottal constricted vowel. Characteristically, the onset of the syllable does not influence the pitch pattern: a rising-falling pitch pattern has been attested following all the permitted onsets and onset clusters, and there are no minimal pairs in which both onset and rhyme are the same and only the pitch pattern is distinct.
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