Just Put Your Lips Together and Blow? The Whistled Fricatives of Southern Bantu

Abstract

Just put your lips together and blow? The whistled fricatives of Southern Bantu Ryan K. Shosted 12∗ Dept of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley 1203 Dwinelle Hall #2650 – Berkeley, CA 94120-2650 USA Dept of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive #108 – La Jolla, CA 92093-0108 USA shosted@berkeley.edu Abstract. Phonemically, whistled fricatives /s Ţ z / are rare, limited almost en- tirely to Southern Bantu. Reports differ as to whether they are realized with labial protrusion and / or rounding. Phonetically, whistled sibilants are com- mon; they are regarded as a feature of disordered speech in English. According to the clinical literature, unwanted whistled fricatives are triggered by dental prosthesis and / or orthodontics that alter the geometry of the incisors—not by aberrant lip rounding. Based on aeroacoustic models of various types of whis- tle supplemented with acoustic data from the Southern Bantu language Tshwa (S51), this paper contends that labiality is not necessary for the production of whistled fricatives. 1. Introduction 1.1. Typology Few phonemes are as typologically restricted as the so-called whistled, whistling, or whistly fricatives / s Ţ z Ţ /. 1 They are said to occur in only a handful of languages: the Shona (S10) and Tshwa-Ronga (S50) groups of Southern Bantu (Bladon et al., 1987; Sitoe, This research was supported by a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship to the author. I would like to thank John Ohala, Keith Johnson, and Ian Maddieson for their insights. I am also grateful to Larry Hyman for his help with the diachronic data. Sam Liebhaber graciously shared his Sheh ri materials ˙ literature. with me. Joyce Cohen and Dr. George Murrell, D.D.S., introduced me to the prosthodontics My colleagues and linguistic consultants at the N´ucleo de Estudos de L´inguas Ind´igenas Moc¸ambicanas, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Maputo, Mozambique were also influential in this resarch. Any errors are my own. The vertical subscript arrows are used for whistled fricatives in the clinical literature (ICPLA, 1994). As far as I know, I am the first to use this transcription for the whistled fricatives of Bantu. Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996, 171) choose not to represent the sound symbolically in their explicit discussion of whistled fricatives. Later, however, they use the symbols [s — — z ] to refer to “a pair of rounded fricatives,” in Shona, but with no reference to the whistle (358). Bladon et al. (1987) and Maddieson (2003, 20, 27) use /s — — z / but this seems unsatisfactory since the diacritic [—] elsewhere signifies only labialization (IPA, 1979). Sitoe (1996) uses /u u /, signifying retroflexion. This may represent the whistling ‘gesture’ better than [s — ], which is really just the older transcription of [s w ] (IPA, 1949). Contemporary orthographies of Shona and Tshwa-Ronga languages use the digraphs sv and zv.