Table Of ContentSumi tone: a phonological and phonetic description
of a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland
Amos Benjamin Teo
Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements
of the degree of Masters by Research (by Thesis Only)
December 2009
School of Languages and Linguistics
The University of Melbourne
Abstract
Previous research on Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the extreme northeast of
India, has found it to have three lexical tones. However, the few phonological studies of
Sumi have focused mainly on its segmental phonology and have failed to provide any
substantial account of the tone system. This thesis addresses the issue by providing the
first comprehensive description of tone in this language. In addition to confirming three
contrastive tones, this study also presents the first acoustic phonetic analysis of Sumi,
looking at the phonetic realisation of these tones and the effects of segmental
perturbations on tone realisation. The first autosegmental representation of Sumi tone is
offered, allowing us to account for tonal phenomena such as the assignment of surface
tones to prefixes that appear to be lexically unspecified for tone. Finally, this
investigation presents the first account of morphologically conditioned tone variation in
Sumi, finding regular paradigmatic shifts in the tone on verb roots that undergo
nominalisation.
The thesis also offers a cross-linguistic comparison of the tone system of Sumi with that
of other closely related Kuki-Chin-Naga languages and some preliminary observations of
the historical origin and development of tone in these languages are made. This is
accompanied by a typological comparison of these languages with other Tibeto-Burman
languages, which shows that although these languages are spoken in what has been
termed the ‘Indosphere’, their tone systems are similar to those of languages spoken
further to the east in the ‘Sinosphere’. Finally, a more global typological comparison of
Sumi with ‘African’ and ‘East Asian’ tone languages demonstrates that Sumi displays
features typically associated with both these language ‘types’. This finding suggests the
need to re-evaluate this traditional dichotomy of tone systems, and the need to consider
morphological structure in typologies of tone.
This is to certify that:
(i) the thesis comprises only my original work towards the Masters,
(ii) due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used,
(iii) the thesis is approximately 36,000 words in length, inclusive of footnotes, but
exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices.
Amos Benjamin Teo
December 2009
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to a number of people responsible for my education on Nagaland and the
Sumi language in particular. First and foremost, I reserve my deepest gratitude for Inotoli
Zhimomi, whom I met while doing a linguistic field methods course run by Professor
Nick Evans at the University of Melbourne in 2007. Without her time, energy and
support for this project, there would certainly be no thesis.
Many thanks also go to Inotoli’s family – to her husband Nick Lenaghan and her sister
Nikhüli Zhimomi (Anikhü) for their continued support in this project, especially for all
the times when they had to mind the children or take over the preparation of food (be it
the smoking of amichi or the cooking of axone) while I bombarded Inotoli with questions
about her language. (A special apology goes to Kivi and Kupo for all the times I stole
their aza away from meal time and playtime.)
Certainly, I cannot thank enough the other members of the Zhimomi family: Inotoli’s
parents in Vishepu; her sisters Ilika (Alika) in Hyderabad and Bokali in Zunheboto, as
well as Bokali’s husband Hekato for their wonderful hospitality during my visit to India
in early 2009. I owe a debt of gratitude to Jekügha Assümi and his wife Hekali for
welcoming me into their home in Zunheboto, especially to Jekügha, who very kindly
donated his time to be recorded and who offered me his own personal copy of Hutton’s
The Sema Nagas.
During this same trip to Nagaland, I had the honour of meeting a number of esteemed
members of the Sumi community, including Mr S. Rotokha, the secretary of the Sumi
Literature Board and Mr Hokishe Yepthomi, who presented me with a copy of his
English-Sumi dictionary. I was also given the privilege of speaking with the Reverend
Yevuto who offered a brief history of the Bible’s translation into Sumi and presented me
with a copy of the Sumi Bible.
Special mention must go to Bernice Dzuvichu, who was responsible for getting me the
Restricted Area Permit that allowed me to legally enter the state of Nagaland (despite my
not travelling as a group of four people, or as a married couple).
In the preparation of this thesis, my deepest thanks go to my supervisors Associate
Professor Janet Fletcher and Professor John Hajek at the University of Melbourne.
Without their invaluable feedback and guidance, both in the process of conducting the
research and in the writing process, this thesis would be nothing more than a collection of
badly written and ill-formed ideas.
Additional thanks go to Alec Coupe, who very kindly gave me a copy of his book A
phonetic and phonological description of Ao: a Tibeto-Burman language and also lent
me his copies of Geoffrey Marrison’s work.
Finally, I would like to extend my gratitude to all my friends and colleagues, including
Sara Ciesielski, Lauren Gawne, Hywel Stoakes, Deborah Loakes, Mary Stevens, Belinda
Ross and Thomas Harris. In particular, I must thank Aung Si, who kindly proofread much
of the final draft and provided me with the Burmese examples used in this thesis. I am
also very grateful to Olga Maxwell, who assisted both in the proofreading of my earlier
drafts and in the provision of much appreciated cocoa products.
Table of contents
List of abbreviations used....................................................................................................1
1 Introduction...................................................................................................................2
1.1 Aims of study.........................................................................................................2
1.2 Language description..............................................................................................5
1.2.1 Linguistic situation..........................................................................................5
1.2.2 Genetic relationships.......................................................................................8
1.2.3 Previous work on Sumi.................................................................................12
1.2.4 Note on orthography......................................................................................15
1.3 Studies of tone in Kuki-Chin-Naga languages.....................................................16
1.4 Lexical tone..........................................................................................................18
1.4.1 Tone languages..............................................................................................19
1.4.2 Autosegmental representation of tone...........................................................20
1.4.3 Phonetic correlates of tone............................................................................21
1.4.4 Tone language typologies..............................................................................23
2 Methodology................................................................................................................28
2.1 Participants...........................................................................................................28
2.2 Recording equipment............................................................................................28
2.3 Carrier phrases......................................................................................................29
2.4 Acoustic phonetic analysis...................................................................................30
2.5 Tone comparison chart.........................................................................................33
3 Segmental Phonology..................................................................................................36
3.1 Phoneme Inventory...............................................................................................36
3.2 Consonants...........................................................................................................38
3.2.1 Plosives..........................................................................................................38
3.2.2 Fricatives and Affricates................................................................................39
3.2.3 Nasals and Laterals........................................................................................41
3.2.4 Approximants................................................................................................42
3.2.5 Trill................................................................................................................43
3.2.6 Minimal sets..................................................................................................43
3.3 Regular phonological processes associated with consonants...............................45
3.3.1 Palatalisation.................................................................................................45
3.4 Vowels..................................................................................................................45
3.5 Regular phonological processes associated with vowels.....................................49
3.5.1 Vowel harmony.............................................................................................49
3.6 Glottal stop...........................................................................................................50
3.7 Cross-linguistic comparison.................................................................................52
4 Phonotactics.................................................................................................................57
4.1 Syllable structure..................................................................................................57
4.1.1 Phonetic realisations of phonological vowel combinations..........................58
4.2 Sesquisyllables.....................................................................................................61
4.3 Word minimality and resyllabification.................................................................64
4.4 Cross-linguistic comparison.................................................................................68
5 Tonal Phonology and Phonetics..................................................................................70
5.1 Number of contrastive tones.................................................................................70
5.2 Tone-bearing unit.................................................................................................71
5.3 Phonetic realisation of tone..................................................................................72
5.4 Variation in F realisation of tone........................................................................79
0
5.4.1 Effects of vowel intrinsic F on tone realisation...........................................87
0
5.5 Comparison of tone systems of other Kuki-Chin-Naga languages......................89
5.6 Lexical comparison among Naga languages........................................................93
5.7 Typological comparison within the Tibeto-Burman family.................................95
6 Tone Assignment and Tone Melodies.........................................................................98
6.1 Toneless possessive prefixes................................................................................98
6.1.1 Non-relational prefix a- and possessive prefixes..........................................98
6.1.2 Tone variation in possessive prefixes..........................................................100
6.1.3 Autosegmental analysis of tonal alternations..............................................101
6.1.4 L tone assignment........................................................................................111
6.1.5 Toneless prefixes in other Naga languages.................................................115
6.2 Tone melodies....................................................................................................117
6.2.1 Verb roots....................................................................................................118
6.2.2 Noun roots...................................................................................................120
6.3 Marked nature of H tone.....................................................................................123
6.4 Typological comparison of tone rules and representation..................................126
7 Morphotonemics........................................................................................................128
7.1 Nominal compounds...........................................................................................129
7.1.1 Formation of nominal compounds...............................................................129
7.1.2 Nominal compounds with no tone sandhi...................................................129
7.1.3 Nominal compounds with tone sandhi........................................................130
7.1.4 Nominal compounds in other Naga languages............................................131
7.2 Deverbal nominals..............................................................................................134
7.2.1 Verbal morphology......................................................................................134
7.2.2 Formation of nominals by a- prefixation.....................................................135
7.2.3 Formation of deverbal nominals..................................................................136
7.2.4 Tone sandhi in deverbal nominals...............................................................138
7.2.5 Deverbal nominals in other Naga languages...............................................145
7.3 Agent nouns........................................................................................................147
7.3.1 Formation of agent nouns............................................................................147
7.3.2 Tone sandhi in agent nouns.........................................................................148
7.4 Miscellaneous morphotonological processes.....................................................151
7.4.1 Reduplication...............................................................................................151
7.5 Final remarks on tone sandhi and tone rules......................................................152
8 Final Discussion........................................................................................................153
References.......................................................................................................................158
Appendix A: Tone comparison chart...............................................................................163
List of figures
Figure 1: Map of Nagaland (Coupe 2003: page xvii).........................................................6
Figure 2: Genetic classification of Kuki-Chin-Naga languages according to Bradley
(1997: 28)............................................................................................................................9
Figure 3: Genetic classification according to Burling (2003: 184)...................................10
Figure 4: Map of language distribution in Nagaland and Manipur (Burling, 2003: 185).11
Figure 5: Sample annotation of atoqhe [atoqhe] ‘lizard’ using the program ‘Emu Labeler’
...........................................................................................................................................32
Figure 6: Acoustic vowel space plotted in the F1 and F2 dimensions (female speaker)..48
Figure 7: Acoustic vowel space plotted in the F and F dimensions (male speaker).......48
1 2
Figure 8: Spectrogram of hiye apu [ʔà.pú] kumo ‘This is not a son’ (male speaker)........50
Figure 9: Spectrogram of niye apu [à̰.pú] ani ‘I have a son’ (female speaker).................51
Figure 10: Prosodic structure of the Sumi syllable...........................................................58
Figure 11: Prosodic structure of a minor syllable in Sumi................................................62
Figure 12: Pitch trace of hiye apu [àpù] kumo ‘This is not a father’ (illustrating LL tones)
...........................................................................................................................................73
Figure 13: Pitch trace of hiye apu [apu] kumo ‘This is not a dipper’ (illustrating MM
tones).................................................................................................................................74
Figure 14: Pitch trace of hiye apu [àpú] kumo ‘This is not a son’ (illustrating LH tones)74
Figure 15: Average F realisation of L, M and H tones across a time-normalised segment
0
(female speaker)................................................................................................................75
Figure 16: Average F realisation of L, M and H tones across a time-normalised segment
0
(male speaker)...................................................................................................................76
Figure 17: Boxplot showing distribution of F values for each tone (female speaker).....78
0
Figure 18: Boxplot showing distribution of F values for each tone (male speaker)........78
0
Figure 19: Average F0 realisation of L tone after voiced vs. voiceless obstruents across a
time-normalised segment (female speaker).......................................................................83
Figure 20: Average F0 realisation of M tone after voiced vs. voiceless obstruents across a
time-normalised segment (female speaker).......................................................................84
Figure 21: Average F0 realisation of H tone after voiced vs. voiceless obstruents across a
time-normalised segment (female speaker).......................................................................84
Figure 22: Average F realisation of L tone after voiced, voiceless unaspirated and
0
voiceless aspirated stops across a time-normalised segment (female speaker).................86
Figure 23: Average F realisation of M tone after voiced, voiceless unaspirated and
0
voiceless aspirated stops across a time-normalised segment (female speaker).................86
Figure 24: Average F realisation of H tone after after voiced, voiceless unaspirated and
0
voiceless aspirated stops across a time-normalised segment (female speaker).................87
List of tables
Table 1: Comparison of transcriptions of nine Sumi words..............................................14
Table 2: Typological profile of ‘East Asian’ and ‘African’ tone languages (following
Evans 2008).......................................................................................................................24
Table 3: Sample of the tone comparison chart used during elicitation sessions...............33
Table 4: Phoneme inventory of Sumi with allophones.....................................................36
Table 5: Comparison of Sumi /ɣ/ and /x/ with other Naga languages...............................53
Table 6: Comparison of Sumi /q/ and /qh/ with other Naga languages.............................54
Table 7: Phonotactic distribution of syllable constituents.................................................58
Table 8: Phonetic output of phonological vowel combinations in Sumi...........................59
Table 9: Phonotactic distribution of minor syllable constituents......................................62
Table 10: Sesquisyllables in Sumi.....................................................................................63
Table 11: Resyllabified sesquisyllables in Sumi...............................................................63
Table 12: Nasal minor syllables in Sumi...........................................................................64
Table 13: Cross-linguistic comparison of phonotactic constraints and segmental features
in Naga languages..............................................................................................................69
Table 14: Mean F realisations of tone..............................................................................76
0
Table 15: Distribution of tones following stops................................................................79
Table 16: Distribution of tones following fricatives and affricates...................................80
Table 17: Distribution of tones following sonorants.........................................................81
Table 18: Comparison of F after voiced vs voiceless obstruents (female speaker).........82
0
