William J. Gedney's Elicitation Questionnaire

Abstract

William J. Gedney was well known for the accurate and extensive data that he collected in his work on Tai dialects and languages. Unlike some investigators who actually settled in a village to learn and then record a dialect, Gedney worked methodically with a large number of individual informants to elicit data. After his retirement in 1980, he often spoke of publishing the questionnaire he had used for the benefit of other researchers. Part of this questionnaire, that for determining tonal systems, appeared in his 1972 article, A Checklist for Determining Tones in Tai Dialects. But it was only after his death in 1999 that his original notebooks with the remaining portion of the questionnaire emerged. That questionnaire, along with the one for tonal systems, is presented here. The Tai family of languages extends across Southeast Asia from Assam in the west to the island of Hainan in the east and from Yunnan, Guangxi, and Guangdong in southern China in the north to the Thai-Malay border in the south. Ahom, now an extinct language, was found in Assam, the farthest point west where the Tai languages are spoken. Shan and related dialects occur in Burma and Thailand as well as along the border in Assam and Yunnan. Lue speakers inhabit the Sipsongpanna region in southern Yunnan and in western areas of Laos. In Thailand Siamese (Thai) and closely related dialects cover the area, while Lao and Lao dialects are spoken in northeastern Thailand and Laos. White, Black, and Red Tai along with Yay are spoken in northwest Vietnam, sometimes spilling into Laos, while Tay (Tho) and Nung can be found in northeast Vietnam. In China, Zhuang speakers can be found throughout Guangxi and in border areas of Yunnan and Guangdong. Throughout these areas intermediate varieties of Tai languages also occur, usually identified by place names. And at the farthest point east, in Hainan, there exist a number of languages that appear to be closely related to the Tai family. Following Fang-kuei Li, scholars generally divide this family into three branches: the Northern, the Central, and the Southwestern. Research on these languages and the Tai family has been in progress for many years, with some exceptional work done in the nineteenth century in the form of Siamese and Shan dictionaries. However, by and large, this early work was done by individuals with little or no linguistic training. Transcriptions, and the resulting publications, were impressionistic, filled with errors and inaccuracies. Often tones were disregarded, vowel length undifferentiated, and unfamiliar sounds ignored. Only in the twentieth century with the work of Fang-kuei Li, Andr6-G. Haudricourt, and William J. Gedney was the rigorous and scientific investigation of these languages initiated. William J. Gedney's investigation of the Tai languages began with his studies of Siamese in the 1940s and 1950s and then with other Tai languages beginning in 1964. Noted for the great care with which he recorded tonal and phonological systems, Gedney described the development of his approach in the following manner. Before going to the field in 1964, he examined previous word lists used by scholars and selected those items which had appeared in two or more of the Tai languages. To these he added words that he felt were inherited Tai words and that would appear in other Tai languages. These words were then arranged in sets such that all the words that he suspected would have the same tone would