Showing posts with label tone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tone. Show all posts

Thursday, September 18, 2014

A phonological and phonetic description of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland

So I should probably apologise / apologize for my lack of updates the past year or so. It's been pretty crazy since I started grad school - I'd have to spend many a blog post explaining all the wonderful things I've been able to do since I started in the linguistics PhD programme here at the University of Oregon.

In the meantime, in the 'American' spirit of self-promotion, I thought I should mention that I finally finished revising my University of Melbourne MA thesis A phonological and phonetic description of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland and got it published with Asia-Pacific Linguistics in Canberra.
It's an open access ebook (print on demand), and you can download it right here at the ANU digital collections page here.

I have too many people to thank for this, especially my family who've supported me all through this crazy journey, as well as the Sumi community / my Sumi family. I'm so thankful for all the amazing people I've met along the way, and all the help I've received in making this possible. Noshikimithi va na!

Monday, September 30, 2013

Fun with tone sandhi - The solution!

Okay, I apologise for the long delay, but finally(!), I present you with the solution to the problem set I posted in my last blog post, many months ago (see here).

(Right click the image below and select 'Open Image in New Tab'.
Or click here for an image you can magnify.
The language is Singaporean Teochew, as spoken by an aunt of mine who lives in Singapore. It's part of the Min Nan group of languages, but Singaporean Teochew is said to have undergone dialect leveling with Singaporean Hokkien - the two are much more mutually intelligible than their counterparts still spoken in China today. Also, although most descriptions of Teochew give 8 tones, I've only been able to find 7 contrastive ones - but there might still be an 8th one that I've missed!

I know I was supposed to post this in mid-June, but a lot of stuff came up, including a move to the United States (via Australia). As some of you may already know, I've just started grad school at the University of Oregon, where I am pursuing a PhD in Linguistics. It's a really exciting time for me. I'll be heading back to India at some point during my course, but unfortunately not this year.

Looking forward to posting about all the cool linguistics topics I'll be looking at during the next year!

Saturday, May 25, 2013

Fun with tone sandhi

The past few months, I've been learning a language here in Singapore that's been noted for its crazy mind-bending use of tone sandhi. I thought I'd write a little about it in this post, since it's a phenomenon that some linguists may not be familiar with (given the tendency for many to run away at the first 'hearing' of anything tonal). At the end of this post, I'm also going to throw in a little puzzle set that I created, just to give people a chance to see the sorts of data some linguists work with. I'm hoping it'll appeal to all the puzzle solvers out there.


Tone sandhi in Mandarin Chinese
Experienced learners of Mandarin will already be familiar with the phenomenon, exemplified by the initially confusing and dreaded rule that specifies that Tone 3 becomes Tone 2 before another Tone 3. This prevents you from saying two Tone 3s, one after the other. For example, the word for 'you' in Mandarin is 你 nǐ (with Tone 3) when said on its own and the word for '(to be) good' is 好 hǎo (also Tone 3). However, when you put them together to get the ubiquitous Mandarin greeting 你好, written as  hǎo in Pinyin, you find that 你 is now pronounced with Tone 2. (This makes it homophonous with 泥 'mud', but most speakers can work out from context that you're not talking about the quality of earth.)

Importantly, the rule applies whenever two Tone 3s occur next to each other in the same phrase, regardless of the actual meaning of the words. Using another example, 很 hěn, an intensifier with the meaning of 'very', remains as Tone 3 in phrases like 很多 hěn duō 'a lot' and 很快 hěn kuài 'very fast', since 多 duō has Tone 1 and 快 kuài 'has Tone 4. But if you want to say 很好 hěn hǎo 'very good', you would have to pronounce 很 as hén, with Tone 2.

Ask a native speaker of Mandarin why on God's less-than-green earth they would say 你好 or 很好 this way, and they'll probably just say that 'it sounds nicer'. There's also actually no physiological, or aesthetic, reason preventing you from producing two Tone 3s in a row. The thing is, tone sandhi rules are language-specific: some tone languages do allow sequences of similarly low (and creaky) tones to occur next to each other, while others may disallow sequences of two falling tones, which Mandarin does allow.

Of course, if you're only interested in learning a tone language that does have tone sandhi, it doesn't really help to ask why it happens, or for instance, why Tone 3 becomes Tone 2 and not Tone 4. You just need to accept that it does happen and that it happens the way it does. And then you need to learn how to apply the tone sandhi rules in actual speech so you don't sound completely moronic.


Tone sandhi vs Tone change
On the other hand, if you're in the business of describing tonal languages, tone sandhi is something that pops up again and again. It can sometimes be a little tricky to talk about, since there's still some disagreement as to how to what the term 'tone sandhi', sometimes called 变调 biàndiào in Mandarin, should include. At least, it is generally accepted that 'tone sandhi' differs from 'tone change', or 变音 biànyīn, which describes similar kinds of tone alternations that are restricted to specific words, largely due to historical reasons. For example, 好 when pronounced hào with Tone 4, means 'to be fond of' (example taken from Chen 2000: 31) - here you can see the connection with 好 hǎo '(to be) good', which indicates a likeable quality. However, this correspondence between Tone 3 and Tone 4 is specific to 好, and changing Tone 3 on another word to Tone 4 is not likely to yield a similar change in meaning.

In contrast, tone sandhi rules, which can also be the products of historical changes in a language, are more 'general', in the sense that they almost always apply regardless of the meaning of words as long as the necessary sound environment condition is present. However, there are instances when tone sandhi rules are not strictly observed - even native Mandarin speakers may sometimes fail to observe the rule described above when confronted with new compound words consisting of Tone 3 + Tone 3.


A tone sandhi puzzle
In the process of learning this tonal language in Singapore, which I'm calling 'Language X' for the moment, I came up with a little puzzle involving tone sandhi. It's similar to the problem sets we give out to undergraduate linguistic students, except I've simplified it a little so you don't need a lot of linguistic knowledge to solve it. I've used the letters A-G to indicate the tones, as well as some symbols known as Chao tone letters which give a visual representation of the tones. The 'stopped' tones refer to tones on words that end in the consonants k and h.

You can view a draft of the puzzle below. Now this may not be the easiest puzzle to cut your linguistics teeth on, but I hope it gives you a taste of the sorts of data linguists work with, and the kind of analytic skills required to describe languages.

(Right click the image below and select 'Open Image in New Tab'.
Or click here for an image you can magnify.) 


The solution will come in mid-June!

[I may have to post less frequently than I already do this coming month because I'm busy revising my Masters thesis to get it published.]


Reference
Chen, Matthew Y. 2000. Tone sandhi: Patterns across Chinese dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Friday, January 20, 2012

On the importance of tones

Even though I've looked at Sumi tone for years (and I can speak another tone language, Mandarin), I still feel like I'm tone-deaf when I listen to the language. Fortunately, I've been getting a lot of help with Sumi tones thanks to my friend Cana, who apart from being a gifted artist, is also a gifted musician.

Sumi has 3 contrastive tones: low, mid and high, all of which are fairly level (except when there's intonation involved). This means that there is a change in pitch height results in a new word, e.g.

apuh [à.pù] ‘father’
apu [a.pu] ‘water scoop’
appu [à.pú] ‘son’

So apuh with low tone means 'father' and appu with high tone means 'son'. The change in spelling is a fairly recent one, which hasn't been universally adopted. But the main thing is, when you say the words out, the consonants and vowels are all the same, the only difference is pitch.

I find the high tone easiest to perceive, but I often get the low and mid tones mixed up. I was actually pretty amazed (I suppose I shouldn't have been, but I still was) when Cana told me that the low and mid tones are closer together in pitch than the high. That was something I'd demonstrated in an acoustic instrumental study of the language a few years ago.

The other problem I have is, when I speak Sumi, I have a tendency to put a slightly higher pitch on the last syllable of a word that I try to stress. As an example, the word ana [ànà] with low tones on both syllables means 'rice'.

But every time I answer the question "Ana chu va chu mphi?" 'Have you eaten yet?' (lit. "Have you eaten rice yet or not?"), I end up saying "Ana chu va." 'I've eaten' (lit. 'I've eaten rice'), pronouncing ana as what speakers perceive as [àná], with high tone on the second syllable. I know it should be low tone, but somehow part of me just wants to stress the whole word, and I end up using a higher pitch to do so.

At least ana [àná] with high tone doesn't mean anything in Sumi, but speakers can still tell it's wrong.

In a similar vein, when I was staying with friends in Kohima a few weeks ago, I was trying to learn a few phrases in Kohima Angami / Tenyidie. In contrast to Sumi, Tenyidie has 5 tones, all of which are fairly level as far as I can tell, and I still can't tell the difference between most of the tones. Anyway, it didn't stop me from learning a few key phrases.

One evening, when asked if I was hungry, I replied with A merü mo. I thought I was saying "I'm not hungry." The verb merü means 'to be hungry' when there's low tone on the final syllable.

Without realising it again, I'd said merü with a high tone on the second syllable.

My friends all burst into laughter immediately. It turns out I'd said "I haven't vomitted."

Monday, January 2, 2012

'Last year' and 'next year' in Sumi

Since we're in the new year, I thought I'd share a neat thing I learnt about Sumi a few weeks back.

The word for 'last year' in Sumi is khanikü [kʰa˩ ni˩ kɨ˩] or [kʰan˩ kɨ˩], with low tone on all the three syllables. The word for 'two years before' is khanikü (alternatively, kkhanikü) [kʰa˥ ni˩ kɨ˩] or [kʰan˥˩ kɨ˩] with high tone on the first syllable instead of low.

Being the language nerd I am, I thought this was cool. But then I found out that the word for 'next year' is toku [to˩ ku˧], with low tone on the first syllable, then mid tone on the next. The word for 'two years from now' is -wait for it- toku (alternatively, ttoku) [to˥ ku˩] with high tone on the first syllable instead of low as well! Now that's something to blog about!

One explanation offered was that people was that in order to say 'two years ago', people repeated the word khanikü, and started emphasising the second one by placing high tone on the first syllable. Then they dropped the first word. A similar thing happened with toku. I doubt this was actually the case, but for the moment can offer no historical explanation of my own.

In other news, I've just learnt that Sumi does have an evidential system, or so I inferred from what someone told me...