Kuki-Thaadow: An African Tone System in Southeast Asia

Abstract

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2007) Kuki-Thaadow: An African Tone System in Southeast Asia Larry M. Hyman 1. Introduction Since the publication of Pike (1948), it has often been assumed that tone systems fall into two types: (i) Chinese, Vietnamese, and nearby languages of East and Southeast Asia are said to have “contour tone systems” in which the various combinations of rises and falls function as complex units. (ii) African and most other tone systems are said to have register tone systems, whose primary oppositions consist of level tones such as High (H) and Low (L). Hs and Ls may combine to form complex rising (LH) and falling (HL) sequences on single tone- bearing units, but these are not complex units like affricates or prenasalized consonants in segmental phonology, but are instead tonal sequences comparable to consonant clusters (Yip 1989). One additional striking observation about Southeast Asian-type languages is their tendency towards what Bickel (2003) terms TAUTOMORPHEMICITY : Each word is a single morpheme and single syllable. While Bickel excludes prosody from the definition, the tautomorphemic condition is met when each tone stays on its own syllable = morpheme (Schuh 1978; Chen 1992). In his comprehensive volume on the phonological structures of African languages, Creissels (1994:241) takes note of the Southeast Asian type and adds, “aucun systeme de ce type n’a ete signale en domaine negro-africain.” He goes on to explain that the contour tones which appear in register systems are almost always transparently segmentable into combinations of level tones in African languages. While a Southeast Asian-type tone system is yet to be unambiguously documented in Africa, the goal in the present paper is to show the reverse—that a bona fide African-type tone system is attested in Southeast Asia. The language I will describe in the following sections is Kuki-Thaadow [kuki tHa:dc& w], a member of the Kuki-Chin subgroup of Tibeto- Burman. Spoken in Northeast India and neighboring Myanmar, it will be seen that Kuki- Thaadow (henceforth, KT) is packed full of properties that we typically associate with African tone systems: two levels, H- and L-tone spreading, downstep, floating tones, polar tones—in short, the very phenomena which we know so well from the study of tone in African languages. 1 The paper is organized as follows. In §2 I present the isolation tones in KT. §3 presents the tonal alternations on lexical morphemes, while §4 considers grammatical tone. The consequences for typology of tone systems are considered in the conclusion in §5. 2. The KT Isolation Tones My investigations of KT began in 2001 with weekly consultant work over an 18 month period with Rev. Thien Haokip from Lamka district in Northeast India. In Fall 2003 I then taught the first half of a year-long field methods course at Berkeley with the assistance of Ms. Vei Ning, a speaker of KT from Myanmar. The phonetic differences between the two speakers are minimal, mostly concerning vowels: While Thien pronounces /ie/ and /uo/ as diphthongs, Ning pronounces these as [e] and [o]. Both pronounce /e/ and /o/ as [E] and [c] and have the same tone system reported in this study. I am extremely grateful to both of them for their dedication to our efforts and for their wisdom and patience.